therussophileorg--2019-12-27--The MEK in Albania

The MEK in Albania

The following is an interview I conducted via email with Osli Jazexhi, an Albanian-based, Canadian-Albanian historian who specializes in the history of Islam, nationalism and religious reformation in Southeastern Europe. His interest covers nationalism, radicalism, religious and ethnic identities in the Balkans. The interview was conducted between December 17 and 19.  How popular is MEK in Albania?  MEK is a terrorist cult that resides in Albania, and which struggles to overthrow the government of a country that has done nothing wrong against Albania. As a result, the majority of the Albanians have no sympathy for this organization whose job is to wage war and terrorism against a foreign country. What MEK does is criminal and punishable according to the Albanian Penal Code and the Constitution of Albania.  MEK was brought to Albania by deception. Albanian politicians like Pandeli Majko, Fatmir Mediu, Sali Berisha etc., asked the Americans to host them in Albania without asking the Albanian people first. This is like as if German politicians were to take into Germany the ISIS army and command, and host them in their country without asking their citizens first.  The first members of MEK came to Albania in 2013. However, the bulk of them were brought in 2016, when the then US Secretary of State John Kerry announced their massive landing in Tirana. The coming of MEK created big fears in the country where many media, security analysts, journalists and the public opinion condemned the deception through which MEK was brought. From 2016 to 2018 the media in Albania has written and produced many debates against the MEK and ISIS fighters. Even the office responsible for fighting extremism classified them as an extremist organization in January 2018. The weird nature of MEK which operates as a messianic jihadi cult, whose members are mujahedeens, live isolated from the world, refuse civilian life and make continuous calls for jihad against Iran, and create fear among the peace-loving Albanians in the same way ISIS does for many people in the world. For this reason in the past years many journalists and activists have criticized the government of Prime Minister Edi Rama by blaming it for turning Albania into a safe heaven for terrorists.  In the past three years MEK has gained notoriety in Albania for its attacks against journalists, the media and any person who questions their activities. MEK defectors and their revelations have appalled the Albanians who hate the Stalinist past of their country, when they were indoctrinated and isolated like MEK does at present with its members.  When MEK first came to Albania they were housed in Tirana. Many of their members, who for many years had been kept in isolation in Iraq, started to defect en masse. Some were caught by the border police for trying to smuggle themselves into Western Europe. The stories that defectors presented to the Albanian public, which showed the brainwashing and radicalizing tactics of MEK against their members, shocked the Albanians. 2016 and 2018 have been critical for MEK, since it faced many defections and scandals from many family members of MEK jihadis who came to Albania trying to rescue their relatives from the organization. To stop this, the MEK leadership took the following steps:  1. They removed their members from Tirana and housed them in the paramilitary camp of Manza known as Ashraf 3, where they are kept locked in and not allowed to walk out of the camp.  2. They asked American and British politicians to intervene in Albania and ask the Albanian authorities to not allow any family member of MEK jihadis to come to Albania and meet their relatives. Their family members were branded as agents of Iran and the Albanian government was ordered to stop their entry in the country.  3. They spread fake news in Albania and Europe by claiming that Iran is sending terrorists to kill them and for this reason forced the Albanian government to keep them in total isolation from the outside world and discourage the media from investigating them.  4. They have asked from all the local media to never interview and investigate them, not to reveal their names and activities, by claiming that if interviewed the media will send out facts which will be used by Iran to kill them. While they succeeded in silencing the Albanian media, they failed with the Western media who have exposed them a lot.  5. They secured the shameful collaboration of the UNHCR office in Albania and Albanian government agencies through which any MEK member who escaped from the jihadi camp and wanted to de-radicalize himself was to be punished by the UNHCR and the Albanian authorities by having his / her social assistance cut, their political asylum rejected, and left without working and traveling documents. In few words, if the mojahedens abandon the jihadi organization, they were to be starved to death.  6. They co-opted some Albanian media like News 24 TV and Vizion + and paid their journalists to support their cause and propagate the fake MEK claims that Iran is a terrorist state which wants to kill them. The owners of News 24 and Vizion + did not allow any debate in their TV stations about what MEK does, how it spreads fake news and attacks their opponents without facts. Journalists like Sokol Balla who covered their events, even produced a documentary showing the jihadis as freedom fighters.  7. They demanded the Albanian authorities to close all Shia religious institutions of the country connected to Iran, block their bank accounts and expel all the Iranians from Albania. The Albanian authorities complied. A Quran foundation, a private High School and Rumi philosophical foundation that were cooperating with religious institutions and universities in Iran were all closed down. Hundreds of Albanians lost their jobs, students lost their education, many Iranians were deported back to Iran and many research projects and book publications were canceled. The Bektashi Community of Albania and other Sufi Tariqas who historically had very close relations with Iran have all been forced to severe their ties with Iran and not invite Shia religious scholars in the country anymore.  How much in the public are Maryam Rajavi and Massoud Rajavi? Do they have much support in Albania?  Massoud Rajavi, the founder of MEK is nowhere to be seen. People who study MEK believe that he is dead, probably because of an injury that the Americans inflicted on him in Iraq when MEK was on the side of Saddam Hussein and was considered a terrorist organization by the United States.  Maryam Rajavi the widow of Massoud, who leads the cult-organization, does not make public appearances. She never comes out in streets and few Albanians know where she hides. It is believed that most of the time she stays with her cult commanders who run the everyday life of the mojahedins and their subversive activities against Iran and probably Iraq.  Maryam Rajavi works mainly behind the curtains. Time after time she releases pictures of meetings with Albanian politicians, where she asks for favors and pushes them to stop the media from reporting on human rights violations that MEK does against her members. The story that MEK and Maryam Rajavi conveys to those Albanian media who have agreed to spread their fake stories is that MEK is ‘the democratic opposition of Iran’, that people in Iran live in a dictatorship and are being killed by the ‘regime’ and they are all waiting for Maryam Rajavi to go and save them from the Mullahs. MEK tries to play the victim in Albania and the West by spreading fake news against Iran and claiming that Iran is ready to conduct a major terrorist attack and kill the ‘democracy loving’ mojahedins. On the other hand, as the Albanian Deputy Minister of Interior Besfort Lamallari have accepted in a TV show, MEK, contrary to Albanian laws, runs its own secret service agency in Albania and serves as a major tool to direct Albanian policies towards Iran. In a few words, MEK has taken over Albanian foreign affairs in regard to Iran in the country, and apart from its foreign fight against Iran, conducts espionage activities inside Albania against Albanian and foreign citizens.  Even thought they spend a lot of money to counter their negative image, the Albanian public opinion and almost all the journalists and security analysts do consider MEK, at least privately, a violent terrorist organization which is hosted in Albania because the Americans have ordered it to be.  MEK has been trying hard to buy a number of Albanian politicians and NGO activists on their side by inviting them to their events in Albania and in France, and connecting them with American and European politicians. They spend a lot of money even with peasants who live in the vicinity of their village of Manza in order to recruit them on their side. There are reports that MEK is teaching its jihadi ideology to young children in the village of Manza; however, the Albanian government has done nothing to stop this dangerous indoctrination.  Nevertheless, the Albanian public opinion including the politicians do not take MEK seriously for what they do and say. MEK’s desire to do jihad and establish a utopian Rajavi cult-like regime in Iran does not make any sense for the Albanians who for 50 years lived under a MEK-like Stalinist regime of Enver Hoxha. No Albanian would ever want to live even for a day in the paramilitary camp of MEK or under the totalitarian ‘Utopia’ of Maryam Rajavi. I do not believe that any Albanian will be cheated to join the jihad of MEK against Iran as many did when they joined DAESH in Syria.  The only use that Albanian politicians have with MEK is the connections that MEK has with high neo-con politicians in the United States. Since the US Embassy has the absolute say about many things that happen in our country, having good connections with MEK for the corrupt Albanian politicians means that they will have access to the Americans and probably save themselves from being sent to jail for their crimes. For this reason, many Albanian politicians, including our president, participate in MEK meetings.  One Albanian deputy who used to seat in Albania’s Security Council in 2018 told me that ‘We know that MEK is a terrorist organization. But the Americans brought them here, and they and our British friends told us to keep them, and we are keeping them because we are told so.’  Is MEK growing in numbers and influence, or diminishing? Why do you think that is?  When the Obama administration brought MEK to Albania, the idea was that they will build an asylum where MEK terrorists will retire and die by escaping justice for their past crimes against Iran and Iraq. MEK was brought to Albania, probably as part of the Iran Nuclear Deal. Iran and Iraq did not want them in their region and the Americans had to do something in order to save them from justice. As a result of their past terrorism, no country wanted to host them. Even the Americans did not want them in the United States.  The only country which accepted them was Albania. Albania was a good choice since our country is run by criminal groups and does not have a functioning legal system like the United Kingdom, Italy or many countries in the West have. By being a lawless country with very weak legal institutions, a corrupt leadership and where the US Embassy has the final say on everything, the Americans made the right decision to bring them to Albania. The other option for MEK would have been the Guantanamo Bay. Many American senators who have visited Albania during the past years have told Prime Minister Edi Rama to protect MEK at any cost and do not allow them to be charged for the murder and crimes they have committed in the past. If MEK was to be located in the United States, United Kingdom, France or Italy, many of its members would have gone to court by now.  After coming to Albania, many MEK members have changed their names and ID-s. Last year, when a Canadian family of Mostafa Mohammady wanted to save their daughter, Sommayeh Mohammady, who is being held in the MEK camp – Mostafa revealed to the media that many MEK commanders who appeared in the media parading his daughter in Iraq had other names. Mostafa and other defectors have revealed that some of the commanders who are today in Albania, in the past have committed crimes and even killed people. This fact has shocked the journalists and the public, but no investigation has been opened by the office of the general prosecutor. The only court case that is ongoing at present against MEK in Albania is the case of Gjergji Thanasi, an Albanian journalist who has been accused for being an Iranian spy by commander Behzad Safari. Thanasi has sued Behzad Safari for slander, libel and defamation and is asking compensation for the damage that MEK fake accusations have made against him.  While during the days of Obama administration MEK kept a low profile, their influence and profile has changed during the beginning of the Trump administration. John Bolton, the National Security Adviser to president Trump, has been instrumental on radicalizing and promoting them as ‘the democratic opposition of Iran’ and promoting them as the ISIS or Free Syrian Army version of a future war against Iran – which would bring regime change in Tehran. In the last three years MEK has transformed its profile in Albania – from an asylum seeking organization who begged Albania to host and ‘save them from Iran and Iraq’ into a militant organization which together with the US administration has pushed Albania to undertake hostile actions against Iran; like the expulsion of the Iranian Ambassador in December 2018. In the past two years MEK and Maryam Rajavi have aggressively demanded from the Albanian government to cut all ties with Iran, expel Iranian diplomats, and has been involved in a huge campaign of spreading fake news against Iran.  The Edi Rama government, who at first was surprised by their demands and was hesitant to please them, in the past year has been forced to give them support on the fake news that they spread and in their attacks against MEK defectors.  However, after the sacking of John Bolton and the investigations that have started against President Trump and Rudy Giuliani in the US, MEK seems to have gone mute. In the past months they have been less aggressive in the Albanian media, and have launched only sporadic attacks against some foreign media outlets like the BBC, Der Spiegel or Albanian journalists like me and Gjergji Thanasi who have reported on their weird activities and organization.  MEK is very vicious against the media. Unlike ISIS or the Taliban who kill the journalists, MEK who cannot do such killings; in Albania, the attacks against them are through character assassination by accusing them of being agents of Iran and working for the Mullahs. This is how they have attacked the BBC, Channel 4, the Guardian, Al Jazeera and many journalists who dare to speak and investigate them. When they attack the media, they do not use their names. They post their attacks in anonymous websites who cannot be traced where they are located. As a result, journalists like me have difficulty to sue them in courts. But the case is different with Gjergji Thanasi, who was attacked by Behzad Safari, a notorious commander of MEK who has to justify his lies in court.  The hate that MEK has against the media is partly because Maryam Rajavi and her commanders live in a totalitarian utopia. They brainwash their soldiers with fake hopes about the imminent victory of their utopian regime change in Iran. Albanian politicians like Pandeli Majko have also fallen pray to MEK radicalization. Two years ago, Majko believed that before 2019 he and Maryam Rajavi would eat ice cream in Tehran after overthrowing the democratically-elected government of Iran. However, while the people of Iran hate MEK and their regime change has never materialized, MEK hates the media and perceives them as its greatest enemy. MEK behaves like the Communist Party of China. Their camps are not much different from the Xinjiang Concentration Camps where Uyghur Muslims are brainwashed to believe that chairman Xi Jinping is the leader of the great Chinese revolution. Like the CCP, which hates the media and have placed Xinjiang in a total lockdown, MEK does the same. Journalists are not allowed to enter in their camps to investigate their members, and the only time when ‘friendly’ journalists and guests are invited they are allowed to film MEK jihadis singing and praising Maryam Rajavi. Exactly what CCP does with its imprisoned Uyghurs in the concentration camps, who when presented to the media are told to sing and dance.  However, after the sacking of John Bolton and Donald Trump’s declaration of retreat from Syria and his abandonment of the Kurds, the MEK leadership seems to be having a very hard psychological time in Albania. Some defectors have told me that MEK fears that Trump will abandoned them like he did the Kurds and this will mean the end of MEK. The Saudi money which is believed to be funding MEK’s existence will cease, and without money its members who now stay in the Manza camp or Ashraf 3 will escape and defect en mass towards Western Europe. Maryam Rajavi will be forced to close her 50-year old jihadi organization and Albania and Europe will have to deal with MEK at the same way as they are dealing with the returning ISIS fighters. Albania will be in the position of Turkey with its 3 million Syrian refugees, while the Americans will discharge the MEK problem to Europe as they are doing with ISIS returnees at present.  How strong is the international support for MEK in your estimation?  MEK had a lot of support when John McCain was alive and John Bolton was advising the White House. MEK was perceived as the Iranian version of ISIS and Free Syrian Army by American neo-cons. However, with the death of McCain and dismissal of Bolton and troubles for Rudy Giuliani, MEK seems to have lost some very important supporters in the United States. MEK is not a military asset for the United States against Iran. They are a bunch of old terrorists, many suffering severe illnesses, who no longer have tanks and cannons like they had under Saddam Hussein. From Albania they cannot easily conduct terrorist attacks against Iran like they were doing from Iraq. The best that they can do in the great regional war between Iran and the Axis of Resistance on one side and Israel and the United States on the other, is to spread lies and disinformation against Iran or to stage false flag attacks in Europe.  MEK has been quite successful on that. Many ‘terrorist’ attacks that the media attributed to Iran in 2018, have in fact been faked by MEK and its members. To date not a single Iranian or Iranian-linked individual or organization has been found guilty in Europe during the past years, even though MEK and Israeli media keep on repeating that Iran is about to mass-terrorize the Europeans.  MEK is being used by Israel and certain elements of the American deep state to serve as a poisoning tool in the relations between Iran and Europe.  Their organization, which is believed to have around 3000 members, needs a huge budget to run. Each MEK member used to take around 500 EURO / month to survive in Albania from UNHCR. The minimum budget that MEK takes to sustain its members and camp is around 1.5 million EURO per month. It is believed that this budget comes from Saudi Arabia. In a year they need at list 18 million Euros, without counting here the money that they spend for building their facilities and hosting periodic events where they invite retired and second-class politicians from the West who get free hotel, food, airplane tickets and some stipends for their attendance.  Coming back to your question how strong is MEK’s international support I could say that they have the support of some countries that are hostile to Iran, like the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia. But no European government loves them, and the European Union despises them since they perceive them as a security threat. The Italians, the Greeks, the Macedonians, the Turks, the Russians etc., all observe MEK with great concern.  MEK tries very hard to create the impression that it has mass international support. In its periodic conferences it invites retired Europeans and Americans, students, workers etc. who, in exchange for their free holiday trip to Albania, are required to go into their gatherings and spend a few hours in photographic meetings that Maryam Rajavi does with them. MEK stages shows in its camp like the CCP does in its concentration camps in Xinjiang with foreign journalists and diplomats. China invites foreigners who receive first-class treatment and in return are expected to lie about Xinjiang and not to investigate what is going on with the Muslim detainees. MEK’s invitees do the same. They do not interrogate MEK members who do not want to do jihad and want to escape from the camp. The invitees in most of the cases are happy to sell to the world a fake story by declaring that MEK is not a terrorist cult which wants to do jihad against Iran, but it is the ‘Iranian opposition’ who ‘wants to bring democracy to Iran’. However, some brave journalist like the brave Alice Taylor who have visited the MEK camp, have revealed to the world how MEK tries to fake its image and use the paid journalists for this fake make up.  Are there any actions in Albania to oppose the MEK? If so, do those actions come from the government, or from individuals?  When MEK came to Albania, their presence was rejected overwhelmingly by many civil society groups, the media and the public. There were many calls for their immediate expulsion from the country. However, in the past two years MEK, with the support of many American and Western politicians, has been able to buy many individuals and silence the media criticism on them. They do this by blackmailing the media who report on them, by character assassination of journalists, or when they cannot silence the media they try to buy them by offering money. Many journalists are paid when they go to MEK camp and produce fake stories on them. MEK never accepts open debates about what they do. They do not know how to act in an open society.  Since MEK is seen as an organization which the United States supports, no politician or religious personality in Albania dares to talk about them in public. Many journalists who have opposed them in the past have been told not to do so anymore. Many media have chosen to ignore them since they know that by speaking against MEK they put themselves into trouble, and as MEK commanders say to many journalists – they will ruin their career.  Do you think MEK is a well-organized group, or is it in disarray?  MEK has three types of members. Some who are fully indoctrinated and follow the ideology of Maryam Rajavi blindly and believe that she is some kind of Holy Person who will establish an utopian Marxist – Rajavist regime in Iran. Some who know that her totalitarian ideology is non-sense, but keep quiet because they know that if they leave the cult, now that they are too old they will not be able to survive and will die in poverty. The third type of their members, who are mainly youths, hate the organization and wait for their moment to escape and live in freedom. MEK does anything in its power to keep its members isolated and scared from the outside world. The majority of its members, especially the youth, are not allowed contact with their families, the media and the outside world since this will give them the connections to escape into freedom.  MEK runs as a paramilitary organization. It has a well-organized command structure, while the rest of its members are treated as simple jihadi soldiers. Some MEK defectors who live in Tirana have told me that there is an open mutiny among the soldiers and when foreign delegations visit the camp, many members are kept locked indoors and are not allowed to attend the mass events. They want to abandon the camp where they live isolated like in prison. MEK members undergo psychological brainwashing very much like the Uyghurs in China’s concentration camps. Camp members are forced to undergo indoctrination classes every day. They do not have access to telephones, the internet and are not allowed to communicate with their families. They are kept under constant supervision, radicalized with ideas of violent jihad and monitored by surveillance cameras. Defectors have told me that Maryam Rajavi rules over them with fear. She and her command scare the mojahedins by claiming that if they leave the camp they will die of hunger or Iran will kill them with its agents.  For as long as MEK receives a budget of millions of dollars and is protected and allowed to isolate its members and abuse their human rights, it will manage to survive for a few more years as an anti-Iran warmongering organization and center of espionage. If Washington or Tel Aviv would need, some of its still-able members will be also used to commit terrorist attacks in the Middle East and Europe. However, if the organization will be left without money, Maryam Rajavi will not be able to pay ‘international supporters’ like Bolton and Giuliani for her cause and its members who will be hungry will riot and abandon the cult like many of their comrades have done in the past.  If Iran reaches a new comprehensive and long-lasting deal with the United States, MEK will very likely lose its sponsors and the organization will either be sent back to Iran or it will dismantle by itself. But even if these things do not happen, in the coming 10 to 20 years the organization will cease to exist since many of its members will be dead by that time and Maryam Rajavi, if she is still alive, will not have the chance to abduct and brainwash new jihadis against Iran.


mintpressnews--2019-12-10--Yemenis Know Firsthand the Extremist Underpinnings of the Pensacola Shooter

SANA’A, YEMEN — The attack on U.S. Naval base in Florida exemplifies the harsh reality of life in Yemen where Saudi pilots routinely kill “nonbelievers” according to an extremist Salafi ideology that serves as the central building block of the Saudi government, and by extension, the Saudi military.  With a cracked skull, a ruptured intestine and severed foot, 35-year-old Meshal Ali Saeed, a Yemeni father, died in a shabby Sadaa hospital on Sunday. His injuries were caused by a bomb dropped by a Saudi pilot in a crowded residential area in the district of Shada in Sadaa province near Yemen’s border with Saudi Arabia, where Meshel, a farmer, lived. Meshel was one of the dozens killed immediately or wounded in the attack, the latest casualties of the Saudi Air Force in the Arab world’s poorest country.  Mohammed Alshamrani, a 21-year-old second lieutenant in the Saudi Air Force called the United States a “nation of evil” before carrying out a mass shooting at a U.S. Navy base in Florida, killing three people, including a Yemeni-American trainee, and injuring eight more before being shot dead by police.                 The shooting incident at a naval base in Florida has sparked angry reactions amid Yemenis who have asked the United States to reconsider supplying U.S.-made bombs, warplanes, and training programs to Saudi Arabia. The United States, they said, is now drinking from the same glass that thousands of Yemenis have been drinking since 2015 when the war on Yemen began.  32-year-old Shrog Khalid, whose daughter was killed when a Saudi pilot dropped a U.S.-manufactured and supplied bomb on their family home in al-Jeraf district in Sana’a in 2015, said, “as the tragedy reaches American families, we hope their country will feel our suffering caused by their weapons and Saudi pilots trained in U.S. bases.” Shrog still has fractures in one of her legs from the bombing.  According to a recent report by the Intisaf Organization for Women and Children Rights, Saudi pilots, along with their coalition partners, have killed and wounded at least 7,500 children in over 1,700 days, leaving more than 800 children disabled and 8,000 others suffering from multiple types of psychological and neurological conditions according to Yusef al-Hadhari, a spokesman for Yemen’s Ministry of Health.  Amnesty International warned in a recent report titled, “Yemen: War and exclusion leave millions of people with disabilities in the lurch,” of the increasingly dire situation faced by the millions of people living with disabilities in Yemen. The report called on the international community to address the suffering of at least 4.5 million disabled Yemenis amid the bloody Saudi-led war.  Yemen’s Ministry of Health says that around three million children under the age of five are also suffering from malnutrition, 400,000 of whom are suffering from severe malnutrition and are at risk of death every ten minutes if they do not receive appropriate medical care. Health Ministry spokesman al-Hadhari also said that the closure of the Sana’a International Airport has prevented approximately 320,000 Yemenis from traveling abroad to receive medical treatment, resulting in 42,000 people losing their lives, 13 percent of whom were children.  Fares, a recent graduate who lost his entire family in a Saudi attack, hoped that the attack on the U.S. Navy base in Florida would serve as a wake-up call for Americans, spurring them to cease their ongoing support for Saudi Arabia. Mohammad Ali, who was wounded during a Saudi attack on a funeral in Sanaa, described the attack as justified revenge for the thousands of Yemenis who were killed by Saudi pilots trained at the base.  According to the family of Meshal Ali Saeed, Meshal was a victim of American training programs that provide Saudi pilots the skills and ability to carry out deadly attacks. Many of Yemen’s civilians who spoke to MintPress expressed concern over U.S. training programs for members of Saudi-led Coalition, which they say gives extremists the ability to kill their children.  The Pensacola Naval Air Station, an early training center for naval pilots from a myriad of U.S.-allied countries, is known colloquially as the “cradle of naval aviation.” It is the crown of the U.S. Navy’s foreign military training program, established in 1985 specifically for Saudi students before being expanded to other nationalities.  There are 852 Saudi nationals receiving training in the United States’ under the Pentagon’s security cooperation agreement with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Most, if not all, of the Saudi pilots who fly a variety of warplanes, including F-15 fighters and C-130 cargo aircraft over only the Yemeni sky, strike civilian targets including schools, hospitals, markets and infrastructure, are trained in the United States.  Over the course of the nearly five-year-long war in Yemen, Saudi pilots, along with their coalition partners, have launched 250,000 airstrikes, dropped half a million bombs and missiles — including 6,000 a phosphorous and cluster bomb — on Yemen according to the Yemeni army. The vast majority of those strikes were on civilian targets.  Saudi Arabia’s King Salman telephoned U.S. President Donald Trump to denounce the shooting, claiming that “the perpetrator of this heinous crime does not represent the Saudi people,” according to the official Saudi Press Agency. According to officials, Saudi Air Force officers undergoing military training in the U.S. were intensely vetted, hand-picked, and often came from elite families in the Kingdom.  Although Saudi Arabia has sought to distance itself from the incident of the Naval Air Station in Pensacola and from hundreds of deadly attacks against civilians in Yemen, the Saudi government has continued its support for hate speech espoused by clerics who preach the extremist iteration of Islam known as Salafism which originated in the Kingdom. Salafi doctrine preaches hate against religious minorities, the United States and anyone disloyal to the Saudi royal family. It is the same ideology practiced by ISIS, al-Qaeda and other extremist groups.  Despite its outward-facing diplomatic charm offensive, Saudi officials have so far done little to curb the use of textbooks and a public education system that preaches Salafist doctrine. This despite that fact this it is the source of hateful propaganda and for the radical causes that help indoctrinate Saudi military members who view other faiths as an abomination. Like the Saudis who were involved in the September 11, 2001 attacks, Saudi military members are brought up in a country rife with extremism supported by both the royal family and Kingdom’s religious institutions. It is precisely that same ideology that was espoused by Pensacola shooter Mohammed Alshamrani.  In Yemen, Saudi forces target civilians based on ideological underpinnings, a fact morbidly demonstrated by the large number of civilian casualties in the country. According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), more than 100,000 people have been killed in Yemen since March 2015.  Saudi troops captured while fighting in Yemen recounted how they were told by Saudi princes and Imams alike that the (Saudi) King Salman Bin Abdulaziz brought them there to defend the Prophet Muhammad and his companions. They will die on the path of God and go to heaven, they were told repeatedly. Yemenis, whether soldier or civilian, are all Rafidah (infidels).  Many Yemenis describe Donald Trump as an accomplice to Saudi Arabia. A hypocrite who justifies crime after crime of his Saudi allies. After all, the Saudi pilots that pulverize Yemeni people in markets, wedding parties, hospitals, roads, and schools are trained in the United States and use American weapons.  In the wake of the Pensacola attack, Trump said just moments after being briefed on the situation that Saudi King “Salman said that the Saudi people are greatly angered by the barbaric actions of the shooter and that this person in no way shape or form represents the feelings of the Saudi people who love the American people.”  Trump, known for his quick-handed responses to terrorist attacks around the world, didn’t label the Saudi gunman a terrorist, as he usually does following such attacks. Instead, he assured Americans of Riyadh’s position before the result of any investigation into the attack had even been released.  Feature photo | Saudi soldiers parade during a concert titled “mettle to the top” at the green hall theatre marking Saudi 89th National Day celebrations in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Sept. 21, 2019. Amr Nabil | AP  Ahmed AbdulKareem is a Yemeni journalist. He covers the war in Yemen for MintPress News as well as local Yemeni media.

religious institutions and state relations


nationalreview--2019-01-21--The Coming Test Acts Will Challenge Religious Freedom

And the pressure they bring to bear will be a major test of faith for Christians.  Think of a country where leading politicians question whether members of a long-established religious minority are fit for public office. Or where the head of state attacks the legal protections that allow minority religions to choose their own leaders without state interference. Think of that country’s press, which has deep ideological and financial affinities with the ruling class’s prejudice, whipping up scare stories about that minority’s schools. Maybe you were thinking of Hungary. But all of these are recent examples of American secularism. And if news of recent weeks is any indication, the pace is only going to pick up.  “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People,” John Adams wrote, “ It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”  Well, Americans stopped being a “religious People” quite a long time ago. And they are becoming progressively less attached to organized religion by the day. Consequently, the accepted meaning of the First Amendment has been changing. And the Constitution is becoming inadequate for the defense of religious people and their institutions.  Instead of allowing the flourishing of various religious bodies in a democratic republic, the language of the First Amendment is used to cultivate a special disgust and suspicion of religious people when they act in public or in the civic space. Its “restriction” of religion is now widely interpreted as a license for America’s best and brightest to establish ideas and ideologies so long as those ideas are detached from religion. Even when those ideas trespass on the free exercise of religion.  One strategy for reducing religious liberty is for politicians and the press to generate fake outrage, to treat the normal everyday realities of religiosity as suspicious and controversial.  Senators Mazie Hirono and Kamala Harris recently questioned whether a candidate for a federal judgeship was unfit because of his membership in the Knights of Columbus, a long-established Catholic fraternal organization and charity. The vice president’s wife, Karen Pence, took part-time work at a Christian school, which, like most religious schools, has a code of conduct or statement of faith obliging teachers to uphold the religious ethos of the school. News outlets treated this everyday fact of life as if it were a novel provocation and spent days documenting the “outrage” it generated. Really, they generated it. A column at CNN described the school as “a real-life setting for ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’”  This story (and others like it) are tactical moves in an effort to “condition the environment” for situations when nominees to federal courts are revealed to have been involved with/sent their children to schools that have policies in place that reflect the abovementioned norms. Second, this story (and others like it) are tactical moves in an effort by opponents of school choice to — having largely lost the battle over the “statist monopoly or parental choice?” debate — cripple voucher and other school-choice programs by pushing legislatures (and enlisting business boycotts and pressure to push legislatures) to exclude from voucher programs those schools that “discriminate.”  The campaign to stigmatize Christian institutions is also seen in the ACLU’s sudden willingness to sue Catholic hospitals and health groups for refusing to provide abortions or transgender services. It will come to Evangelical colleges that have dorm or conduct policies that reflect their convictions about marriage and sex. One can predict with near certainty that in a few years a handful of real stories of neglect or abuse will be used to create a general moral panic about religious homeschoolers.  The cumulative effect of these campaigns of legal and social harassment will be something akin to the English Penal Laws and Test Acts, the very laws that the America’s Founders wanted to escape. Those laws threatened employment and restricted the political action of those dissenters who could not endorse the established opinions of the state. And the pressure they bring to bear will be a major test of faith for Christians themselves.  At America’s founding, it would have been obvious to all statesmen that definitions of marriage and the recognition of marriages trespassed into the domain of religious doctrine, an area they tried hard to avoid. It would have been obvious that the religious practice that schools and seminaries obliged on their students and teachers were not the government’s business. But it is no longer obvious to those who would urge Catholic and Evangelical institutions toward the revised moral practice of Episcopalianism. Their doctrines travel under the name of egalitarianism, and so these advocates feel themselves free to demand universal loyalty to them.  Passing the coming test will require great reserves of moral courage from the administrators of religious institutions. The legal tests will drain and waste away great gobs of money from ordinary believers. And it will test our patience, and even our patriotism. The spirit is willing, but our legal protections are weak.


nationalreview--2019-01-28--Amanda Spielmans War on Religion in Great Britain

Amanda Spielman’s War on Religion in Great Britain

In the name of ‘British values,’ French-style secularism is being imposed on religious schools in England.  Karen Pence has come under fire for her job at a Christian school, because the school in question follows orthodox Christian views on sexual relations outside of wedlock. This has spurned a whole wave of online discussion lambasting such schools; while of course abuses and mismanagement in Christian schools ought to be brought to light and addressed, this is quite a different matter. Should private, religious institutions be allowed to dissent from secular worldviews? The question has become a heated one across the pond.  Amanda Spielman was an odd choice for England chief regulator of schools. Spielman, who comes from the private-equity world, was staunchly opposed by the Education Select Committee in Parliament. Its chairman, Conservative Neil Carmichael, described her responses as “particularly troubling,” leading the committee to “call on the secretary of state not to proceed with Ms. Spielman’s appointment.” Carmichael noted that such opposition is unusual but maintained that the “seriousness of [their] concerns” warranted a report. Nicky Morgan, education secretary in the Cameron government, confirmed her over their objections, and Spielman has served in the role at Ofsted (the Office of Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills) since January 2017. Her performance since has confirmed the fears of committee members. She has waged a war against religious schools of all dominations for the past two years— and has justified that in the name of “British values.” The claim, and her behavior, require unpacking.  In 2014, the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government in Britain published guidance directing all schools to “actively promote” the “British values of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs.” This seems innocuous enough and perhaps par for the course, but the word “promote” is key. Until that point, schools had been required to “respect” these values. What’s the difference?  Perhaps a good place to look for the root of this initiative would be the Lib Dems’ platform for the 2010 election. Nick Clegg held that faith schools must promote homosexual relationships. These, one assumes, fall under the umbrella of “different beliefs” enshrined in the British-value guidance. But there’s an immediate tension there, because toleration, properly understood, does not mean supporting every behavior or belief. To the contrary, it entails coming to terms with difference, respectfully. And, furthermore, the ability of religious groups to tailor the non-academic elements of their schooling to the ethical codes they follow is part of English liberty itself. The language of the guidance is quite broadly defined. By its very nature, this means that the regulator has considerable leeway for interpretation.  Spielman’s predecessor at Ofsted was Sir Michael Wilshaw, a lifelong educator. Wilshaw founded and led a high school in one of the most deprived parts of London, with a largely poor student body, and led the students to some of the highest academic performance in the nation. For this, he was widely hailed, and presumably it is why he was named the chief inspector at Ofsted in 2012. Under his tenure, even after the new guidance was issued, inspections proceeded in a normal manner. After all, he was an experienced hand at these things. But once Spielman took the reigns, the dangers of the government’s ill-defined education directive became obvious.  In summer 2017, the Vishnitz Girls School, a private Jewish institution in Hackney, failed a third Ofsted inspection in a row for its deficiency in teaching a “full understanding of fundamental British values.” If a school receives a grade from Ofsted that is less than “good,” it is subject to future inspections that will fail it if it does not “improve” in whichever criteria were cited. Vishnitz’s failing mark was despite the fact that in Ofsted’s own report, the school was described as having knowledgeable teachers, high-quality resources, and a school culture “focused on teaching pupils to respect everybody, regardless of beliefs and lifestyle.” To me, that sounds exactly like what a parent would want out of a school.  Which key element of British heritage did the school deny its students? Was it the Magna Carta? Ofsted states it outright in its report: The school did not teach pupils about gender reassignment and sexualities, thereby restricting “pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development” and rendering them unfit for “present-day society.” That is quite a claim, considering that the school is for girls under the age of eight. Apparently, such information is such a fundamental part of what it means to be British that prepubescent children have to be taught it. (It really makes me wonder how we got by all of these years, lacking component so crucial to Britishness.) Six other faith schools were hit with similar sanctions at about the same time. The move found an immediate and eager reception in Britain’s secular-humanist crowd, who called for “proper sanctions” on such schools.  At several Jewish, Christian, and Muslim schools, the building is effectively both a boys’ school and a girls’ school with shared facilities (though some schools are co-ed for primary-school students.) These also came under attack from Ofsted for, yet offending “British values”. Boys’ schools still exist in Britain, as do girls’ schools — yet when religious schools adopted a version of that system, they were engaging in subversion. The High Court had ruled that to be fine, but Spielman’s Ofsted appealed, citing the “Equalities Act” of 2010 (despite the fact that they had passed inspection after the Act, but before Spielman), and the ruling was overturned. Now these schools are faced with the choice of shutting down or finding the funding to split into two fully separate schools. This too met with glee by secular humanists, who called the schools’ arrangement “gender apartheid.”  Spielman’s language in her first annual report sounds more Soviet than British: “It is right that we use compulsory education to make sure children acquire a deep understanding of and respect for the British values” even if they are “in tension with parental wishes or with community norms.” The state, in Spielman’s view, emphatically knows more than the family when it comes to what’s best for children. Noting that “Ofsted has found schools that deliberately [resist] British values,” she gives examples of some of these horrors, such as school leaders’ “naïvely” asking conservative clergy for advice on accommodating their religious students. It is truly a wonder that education in England has survived all these centuries without Spielman’s arrival to save it.  Chaya Spitz described Spielman’s first year in power in the Jewish Chronicle:  At the parliamentary level, there are some promising signs. Spitz wrote last year of a visit by Sajid Javid, who was then the communities secretary and is now home secretary, to Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls’ School, a high-performing Jewish school that had been a frequent target of Ofsted,. Students and staff alike described their harassment by Ofsted inspectors, with an eleventh-grader describing the questions as being similar to the bullying she experienced in childhood. Javid said to the students, “You embody British values. You are British values. This government will protect you.”  Javid’s statement is quite right, but Ofsted’s project of coercive secularism is still very much in effect. Its new proposals do very little to change its conflict with religious schools, which will continue to perform poorly in its inspections, even when they produce well-rounded and academically talented students. Ultimately, the only lasting solution to the problem is to remove the 2014 “guidance” entirely, which would have to be done at the government level. Its vaguely defined scope and forceful mandate have together allowed the school-inspection system to be whatever Ofsted’s chief inspector wants it to be, and when that inspector is someone like Amanda Spielman, it means a sustained attack on religious freedom in Britain. But for both the long and the short term, sacking Spielman and replacing her with someone like Sir Michael, whose career has been devoted to education from the ground level, would be a good start.


nationalreview--2019-06-30--The Catholic Film Alliance and a Rebirth of Religious Patronage of the Arts

Christians should create their own cultural touchpoints that are just as excellent as the best Hollywood has to offer.  The Hollywood “culture war,” it would seem, has been an emphatic loss for the religious Right. When a film such as Fifty Shades of Grey can flow effortlessly into the mainstream, one would be hard pressed to claim that the fight is still alive. Most religious viewers have come to expect modern movies and TV shows to embrace a distinctly godless doctrine, one that spits in the face of religious institutions and traditional family structures, preferring instead to exalt basic hedonism and the destruction of tradition. What was once a fiery debate has turned into an apathetic shrug  Now, I am by no means advocating for the Legion of Decency to reemerge and dictate a filmmaker’s creative process (although there are certainly pros to such a scenario), but film on the whole seems to be an arena where the distinctly religious has not fared terribly well. While religious music, painting, sculpture, and architecture have expanded into the 21st century, the same cannot be said for cinema (save for a few gems, of course).  Perhaps this drought can be attributed to the fact that overtly evangelistic movies are notorious for being aesthetic disasters. God’s Not Dead, the infamous Pure Flix portrayal of the perils of a Christian student forced to defend his faith at a godless university, received a whopping 13 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, while its successor, God’s Not Dead 2, received an even more impressive 8 percent on the almighty TomatoMeter. Pure Flix, the self-described leading studio of “faith and family media,” has managed to create oodles of movies with the same artistic and didactic stylings of the gospel tracts handed out by your local street-corner evangelist. Not to say that their methods are entirely ineffective in spreading the good news, but they certainly work to confirm the hypothesis that American Christianity must needs be artless and unrefined.  Certainly there are films such as Martin Scorsese’s Silence and Paul Schrader’s First Reformed that are distinctly religious and distinctly beautiful. Imbued with Christian themes, both exemplify a simultaneously charitable and critical comprehension of the faith. The problem is, despite overwhelmingly positive reviews, the films underperformed at the box office — in a consumer-driven market, it comes as no surprise that base entertainment value is preferred over cinematic substance and spiritual themes.  However, there may be hope yet — a shift brewing in the movie industry, in the way movies are resourced, produced, and distributed, may provide an opportunity for a renewed method of producing countercultural cinema.  For a behemoth piece published by the New York Times last week, “How Will the Movies (As We Know Them) Survive the Next 10 Years?,” reporter Kyle Buchanan asked dozens of big wigs in Hollywood about the future of film in a market swamped with streaming services. From his collection of interviews there emerged a resounding conclusion: The movie industry is approaching a unique kind of financial crisis.  While major blockbusters such as Avengers: Endgame and Star Wars: The Force Awakens astonish with box-office numbers in the billions of dollars, such bounty is not shared by all. Owing to the overwhelming supply of content continuously available through the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime, it has become increasingly challenging for smaller productions to make a decent profit. In short, Hollywood’s market is flooded — while movies are still immensely expensive to create, the massive increase in supply has forced down their value. For those seeking to create spiritually meaningful, more artistically minded movies, the current market is fairly unforgiving and the future is uncertain.  This disruption caused by streaming services raises a larger question: How are we (and how should we be) funding artistic endeavors in films? I think it is fair to say that at no other point in history has an art form become so aggressively commoditized. In terms of the spiritual and the cinematic, is it a good idea to subject religiously minded films to the raging desires of a characteristically godless market?  A new organization founded this year, the Catholic Alliance for the Film Arts, has a distinct vision to address the dilemma. According to its website, the “Catholic Alliance for the Film Arts is an association of Catholic organizations united towards the financial stewardship and promotion of films of excellence.” Their mission: to “raise funds and facilitate awareness around quality filmmaking consistent with the Christian creative vision.”  Their first project, currently underway, is to raise the funds for Five by Flannery, a proposed anthology film of five of Flannery O’Connor’s cherished short stories, with the final product structured something like the Coen brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Flannery O’Connor, a devout Catholic and renowned author, captured the mystery of faith through deeply human stories of rural, mid-century America. Her work would certainly be ideal for a project seeking to place the sacred and the cinematic in conversation with each other.  What I find most interesting about CAFA’S project, however, is its approach to raising funds. Taking a crowdfunding approach, CAFA hopes to raise $10 million (with $3 million as its minimum to start production), for Five by Flannery, from regular folk with an interest in faith and film. Having raised $571,000, it has a way to go before it can get the project off the ground.  Although its vision is perhaps more hopeful than realistic, using an angel-investor approach of sorts could serve as a model for a new age of patronage in religious art. If Christians are to take up the Pope Benedict’s call for a “new evangelization,” an approach that integrates faith with art and culture and teaches the “art of living,” patronage of the arts seems like a good place to start.  To the reader concerned with the secularization of young America, a new age of patronage in religious art, especially in the cinematic arena, could be exactly what is needed for the Instagram generation. For the Christian Millennial (or any religious Millennial, for that matter), there exists a substantial divide between the culture of her generation and the tenets of her faith. Instead of waiting for Hollywood to produce a spiritually enriched unicorn every few years, Christians should take up the call to create their own cultural touchpoints that are just as excellent, moving, and beautiful as the best Hollywood has to offer.


nationalreview--2019-09-11--Jerry Falwell Jr Shows How the Advance of Christendom Can Harm Christianity

Jerry Falwell Jr. Shows How the Advance of Christendom Can Harm Christianity

Our wealth can be great. Our influence can be vast. But it is for naught if our commitment to Christendom supersedes our commitment to Christ.  If you haven’t read Politico’s lengthy investigative report on Jerry Falwell Jr.’s conduct as president of Liberty University, published earlier this week, I’d urge you to do so. It’s a sordid tale of the self-dealing, personal ambition, and extreme intolerance for dissent that’s long been an open secret at Liberty and beyond. It’s also an extraordinarily familiar tale for any person who’s spent any time around institutional evangelicalism. Time and again, powerful Christian men create or nurture powerful Christian institutions — only to fall prey to the temptation to equate the advance of those institutions and their own power with the advance of the Gospel and the Kingdom of God.  In other words, the zeal for the advance of Christendom harms the practice and witness of the Christian faith.  Some readers will read that sentence and immediately think, “Ahh, Kierkegaard.” I was reminded of Kierkegaard’s Attack Upon Christendom by Matt McManus in his fascinating essay about the challenges Christians face in an increasingly secular age. McManus invokes Kierkegaard and the Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor to note that “as the course of secularization deepens — many traditionalist-Christians can be convinced that only worldly power can prevent the world from sliding into irreligious darkness.”  The Evangelical analogue to the state religious establishments of years past — the “Christendom” that all-too-often redefined the faith as a kind of cultural and legal conformity, a rote adherence to external religious dictates — is the creation of a series of extraordinarily wealthy, powerful, and influential institutions that not only reach and influence Americans by the tens of millions, but also shape the course and conduct of the domestic and foreign policy of the most powerful nation in the history of the world.  A form of Christendom is necessary and important. That form should not be state-sanctioned Christianity, but rightly oriented private institutions that facilitate the spread of the Gospel and the compassionate works of the church. I’ll never forget the kind and loving Catholic social worker from Catholic Charities of Tennessee who helped my Calvinist family adopt an Ethiopian Orthodox child.  Moreover, rightly oriented institutions can impose the necessary theological and spiritual discipline that prevents churches from spinning off into apostasy and error. If a church proclaims that it is Southern Baptist or a member of the Presbyterian Church in America (my denomination), that has to mean something.  But it is the very importance of these institutions that can lead Christians astray. The institutions of Christendom are a means of advancing Christianity. Liberty University is valuable not because it exists, but rather because at its best it can and absolutely still does deepen and strengthen the genuine faith of its students and faculty. At the same time, the imperative that “Liberty must prosper” is not the same thing as declaring that the “Gospel must advance,” and the very moment that those two concepts start to conflict, then the institution must yield to the Gospel.  Take the extreme (but unfortunately common) example of how the defense of Christendom can damage Christianity: the often-reflexive institutional defensiveness in the face of sex-abuse allegations in both Catholic and Protestant religious institutions. Has any secular force harmed the church more than the church has harmed itself by  its defensive response to the terrible crimes and horrific sins in its midst? “We must protect the church” is an impulse that can directly contradict the imperative to seek justice and care for the souls of those who are wounded by abuse and exploitation.  I expect that Jerry Falwell Jr. could look you in the face and declare with extraordinary sincerity that his work and ministry has been an unmitigated success. Liberty is far wealthier than it was when he took control. It educates tens of thousands more students. He’s welcome in the halls of power, including even in the Oval Office. On his watch, Christendom has advanced.  But has Christianity? When we study declining faith in America, especially among America’s younger generations, we hear time and time again that hypocrisy and corruption within Christian institutions alienate American hearts and minds. We don’t want to hear that message. We claim time and again, often with justification, that we’re defamed in the media. “We’re better people than they say,” we think. “If only you truly knew us, then you’d feel the warmth in our hearts.”  But those with eyes to see can plainly view Jerry Falwell Jr.’s thumbs-up picture in front of a Playboy cover. They can recognize double standards, including Franklin Graham’s righteous anger at Bill Clinton’s lies giving way to his emphatic declaration that Trump’s infidelities and illegal payoffs are “nobody’s business.” They can see in their own communities when faith leaders cover up abuse or engage in the petty intolerance or self-dealing that Politico exposed at Liberty.  And they also can hear when people of faith justify hypocritical alliances, double standards, and even blind ambition by arguing that it “protects the church.” No, it protects Christendom, and there are times, sadly, when Christianity retreats even within the heart of Christendom itself.  The practice of Christianity requires faith and courage. It often requires believers to do what’s counterintuitive and utterly contrary to worldly logic. We gain our lives by losing our lives? The last shall be first? There are times when every single earthly impulse will be screaming at you to compromise, to forsake the hard path, to “trust in chariots because they are many and in horsemen because they are very strong.” Christianity thrives when you resist that impulse, when you trust in the seemingly upside-down truths of scripture.  Our wealth can be great. Our influence can be vast. But it is for naught if our commitment to Christendom supersedes our commitment to Christ.


nationalreview--2019-09-20--A California Court Dealt a Blow to Religious Liberty Its Time for SCOTUS to Act

A California Court Dealt a Blow to Religious Liberty. It’s Time for SCOTUS to Act.

The California Court of Appeals rules that a transgender patient can sue a Catholic hospital for refusing to perform a hysterectomy.  Yesterday, the California Court of Appeals issued a truly remarkable opinion in a truly remarkable case. It held that a Catholic hospital could indeed face legal liability for failing to perform a hysterectomy as part of a female-to-male “transition” — even though its policy broadly bans sterilization surgery generally (not just for trans individuals) and even though the hospital referred the patient to a non-Catholic facility in the same network. The patient obtained the hysterectomy a mere three days after the original scheduled surgery date and sued anyway.  The facts of the case are simple. The plaintiff, Evan Minton, initially scheduled a hysterectomy for August 30, 2016, at Mercy San Juan Medical Center (part of the Dignity Health hospital network) as a treatment for gender dysphoria. Mercy is a Catholic hospital, and the day before the scheduled surgery, Mercy canceled the procedure. It cited the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ “Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services.” As the court noted, “The Directives prohibit direct sterilization and require that bodily and functional integrity be protected and preserved.”  In other words, a Catholic hospital was upholding basic Catholic religious doctrine.  Mercy’s president then recommended that Minton’s doctor obtain emergency admitting privileges at nearby Methodist Hospital, which is also a Dignity Health facility. The doctor obtained privileges and performed the surgery on September 2, 2016. Minton then sued Dignity Health, claiming that he was the victim of gender identity discrimination.  The trial court dismissed his complaint, but yesterday the California Court of Appeals revived his claims. It held that Dignity Health could protect the religious liberty of its Catholic institutions only if “it can provide all persons with full and equal medical care at comparable facilities not subject to the same religious restrictions.”  It also held that even the short, three-day waiting period between the initial scheduled surgery at Mercy and the actual surgery at Methodist did not constitute “full and equal medical care.” Instead, the court wrote, the plaintiff “experienced a startling and painful notification that the surgery would not go forward.” When the plaintiff’s surgery was cancelled, “he was subjected to discrimination.”  Note the burden this ruling places on Catholic institutions — they will be compelled to provide care unless they actively facilitate the provision of care elsewhere, and even the most brief delays are legally intolerable.  The case was decided under California state law, by a California appeals court, applying a California statutory and constitutional analysis. But the federal constitution applies here as well, and that brings me to the Supreme Court. This upcoming term it can decide a case that could and should transform the fight for religious liberty and decisively protect the right of religious institutions to uphold church teachings in the provision of their public services.  That case is called Sharonell Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, and the pending cert petition challenges the city’s punitive actions against Catholic Social Services based on CSS’s refusal to “provide written endorsements for same-sex couples which contradict its religious teachings on marriage.” While Fulton and the California case are obviously not identical, a ruling protecting religious liberty in Fulton would create a federal precedent that the California state court would be required to consider.  Moreover, the petitioners in Fulton are asking the Supreme Court to correct a historical wrong. They’re asking the court to reverse Antonin Scalia’s great mistake — his opinion in Employment Division v. Smith that gutted the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment and greatly expanded state authority over religious individuals and religious institutions.  At present, blue states across the United States are attempting to use expansive nondiscrimination to coerce religious institutions to violate their religious principles as a condition for providing charitable or commercial services in their states. Even in the absence of evidence that any LGBT person has been denied access to adoption services or medical care, states are still bringing down the hammer.  For example, in Fulton, the city took action against CSS even though not one LGBT couple had approached CSS for foster services from its opening in 1917 through the filing of the case in 2018. In the California case, the court ruled that there could be actionable discrimination even though the LGBT plaintiff obtained the services he sought from the defendant in the case.  Given these facts, it often appears as if activist states (and their activist allies at, for example, the ACLU) are less interested in ensuring that LGBT patients and families have access to care or services (which they do) than in bringing religious organizations into compliance with the moral mandates of the sexual revolution.  Make no mistake, there are times when religious-liberty claims should yield to nondiscrimination statutes. The Supreme Court was right to decide in Newman v. Piggie Park Enterprises that it was “patently frivolous” for a South Carolina restaurant to argue that the Free Exercise Clause protected its policy of excluding black customers.  California and Pennsylvania in 2019 are nothing like South Carolina in 1968, and it’s past time to stop treating modern religious institutions as if they’re the harbingers of a new Jim Crow. Our nation has room for religious and secular institutions, and it should be beyond the power of the state to coerce religious institutions to compromise on conscience — especially when there is evidence that patients and families enjoy access to alternative choices.  It’s time, this term, for SCOTUS to step up and draw a line in the sand. It should grant cert in Fulton and repair free-exercise jurisprudence. The state may encroach no farther on the constitutional liberty of  religious institutions.


Whither Anti-Communism?

The Vatican and the Western business elite, once instrumental in the West’s winning the Cold War, have been brought to heel by the Chinese Communist party.  The Berlin Wall fell when I was just in primary school. Later in life, as I was beginning to develop my convictions about life and politics, I was taught that the West had faced down this threat to history, that institutions such as the Catholic Church and major Western business interests had brought down the dreadful and wicked Communists in the name of political, religious, and economic freedom.  At the time, it stood to reason that the Western religious and business establishments had played such a big part in winning the Cold War. The Soviet Union tried to crush and humiliate Christian institutions wherever it went; indeed, many radicals became Communists precisely because of Communism’s inherent and fanatical anti-clericalism. Free enterprise was suppressed under the Communist regimes of the 20th century.  The hostility of the Catholic Church and western titans of industry to Communism could be taken for granted then. But it can’t be anymore — not in the era of President Xi Jinping.  I was reminded of this just today, when PBS’s revival of Firing Line released a preview of host Margaret Hoover’s interview with Michael Bloomberg, the Wall Street tycoon and former mayor of New York who has repeatedly flirted with running for president over the past decade. Hoover was talking to Bloomberg about China’s record on pollution, and she pointed out that its growth and coal-burning were, by Bloomberg’s standards, a threat to the global environment so great that it could not be overcome by any carbon-reduction strategy the United States might adopt.  “So, the United States currently accounts for about 15 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions. China accounts for roughly 30 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions. How do we — even if we get to net-zero [emissions], how do you get China, India, and the other countries to be good partners?” Hoover asks.  “China is doing a lot,” Bloomberg responds. “Yes, they’re still building a bunch of coal-fired power plants. . . . But they are now moving [coal-burning] plants away from the cities. The Communist party wants to stay in power in China, and they listen to the public. When the public says, ‘I can’t breathe the air’ — Xi Jinping is not a dictator. He has to satisfy his constituents or he’s not going to survive.”  “Xi Jinping is not a dictator?” a clearly stunned Hoover asks.  “No, he has a constituency to answer to,” Bloomberg replies.  This is true as far as it goes: Xi Jinping still needs to please those in the inner sanctum of the Chinese Communist Party. But when Hoover goes on to express her incredulity at the idea that “the Chinese government is responsive,” Bloomberg cuts her off with great conviction. “Of course they are!” he says, adding, in total ignorance of history and political theory, “No government survives without the will of the majority of its people. He has to deliver services!”  Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve heard it here first: Tyranny does not — and, in fact, cannot — exist!  I don’t mean to pick on Bloomberg, however bad he’s made himself look here. What concerns me is that the attitude he expressed to Hoover has come to predominate among the American business elite. Tim Cook is happy to announce retaliatory measures against U.S. states that are on the wrong side of the culture war. But you won’t hear a peep about the anti-suicide nets that Apple’s Chinese contractor Foxxconn installed to deal with the public-relations problem of iPhone-assembly workers throwing themselves to their deaths. Nor about concentration camps for Muslims in Jinjiang province, or the ructions in Hong Kong. In an article on the trade war, James McGregor, the chairman of the greater China region for the consultancy APCO Worldwide, was quoted admitting the awful truth: “For many American tech companies, Xi Jinping is more important than Donald Trump, because China is often their largest and fastest-growing market.”  The Church might even be even worse in this respect. “Right now, those who are best implementing the social doctrine of the Church are the Chinese,” Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, the chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, said last year as the Vatican was buttering up the Chinese ahead of a historic deal meant to solve long-standing conflicts between the Church and the Chinese Communist Party. Like Bloomberg, Sorondo burbled credulously about a fictive regime that does not exist, praising China’s “positive national conscience.” “You do not have shantytowns, you do not have drugs, young people do not take drugs,” in China, he said. Even better, “the economy does not dominate politics, as happens in the United States, something Americans themselves would say.”  Last year’s deal aimed to unify China’s underground Catholic Church with the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association (CPCA), the Communist Party body meant to regulate Catholicism in the country. The Vatican secretary of state, who oversaw its negotiation, has had to admit in retrospect that it is “not a good agreement.” But it was the only agreement they could get. The day after it was signed, Xi humiliated the Vatican by having the bishops of the CPCA sign a statement affirming their “independence” from Rome, and their determination to pursue the “sinicization” of their religion. Prelates who remained underground, like Bishop Peter Shao Zhumin, were rounded up and detained.  This, whether any outsiders care to admit it in public or not, is just what the Chinese Communist Party does: It co-opts the businesses and religious institutions that it can, and swallows those that it can’t whole. That the West’s anti-Communist coalition now seems quite a bit smaller than it once was is a sign of the Chinese regime’s success.


nationalreview--2019-09-27--Whistleblower Filed Report with CIA Before Submitting Complaint

The whistleblower who submitted a complaint on possible abuses of power by President Trump originally reported the matter to the CIA general counsel, according to a report from the New York Times.  The CIA lawyer, Courtney Simmons Elwood, then shared the report with the White House and the Department of Justice, following standard procedure with regard to complaints of this type. The whistleblower remained anonymous throughout the process.  Elwood also took up the whistleblower’s concerns with officials from the Justice Department. Eventually Attorney General William P. Barr was made aware of the allegations, but was not involved in planning further proceedings regarding them.  However, during this time, the whistleblower learned that his concerns had been passed on to the White House. He suspected that the CIA wasn’t taking his concerns seriously, so he decided to file a complaint with the intelligence community inspector general, Michael Atkinson, a move that gave him legal protection.  The whistleblower complaint was released Thursday in redacted form. The complainant alleges that the Trump administration went to extraordinary lengths to keep the contents of a July phone conversation between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a secret, and that several White House officials with direct knowledge of the conversation worried that Trump had used his office to try to leverage his own political gain.  The Trump administration released the transcript of the call on Wednesday. The transcript records Trump pressing Zelensky to look into possible evidence of corruption on the part of Hunter Biden, presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son, who had business holdings in Ukraine at the time his father was vice president.


nationalreview--2019-10-11--Beto O’Rourke Calls for Stripping Churches of Tax-Exempt Status If They ‘Oppose Same-Sex Marriage’

Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke defended his LGBT platform during a CNN town hall on Thursday night, calling for religious institutions to lose their tax-exempt status for opposing gay marriage on First-Amendment grounds.  “There can be no reward, no benefit, no tax break for anyone … that denies the full human rights and the full civil rights of every single one of us.” O’Rourke told a cheering audience. “And so as president, we are going to make that a priority, and we are going to stop those who are infringing upon the human rights of our fellow Americans.”


nationalreview--2019-10-11--Moderate NY Dem Max Rose Bashes O’Rourke’s Policy Extremism: ‘I Don’t Think Losing Is Cool’

Democratic freshman congressman Max Rose slammed Beto O’Rourke for being a “social-media rock star” who prioritizes his public image over winning elections during an interview with New York Magazine.  “When you win you get to help people, and when you lose you get to be a social-media rock star. So I don’t think Beto is cool, and I don’t think losing is cool,” Rose said.  “Losing is not as cool as he thinks it is,” he added.  On Thursday night, O’Rourke called for for religious institutions to lose their tax-exempt status for opposing gay marriage, saying “we are going to stop those who are infringing upon the human rights of our fellow Americans.”  Rose represents New York’s 11th district, which includes Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn. Trump won the blue collar district by roughly ten points in 2016. Rose has been critical of his fellow Democratic freshmen representatives since taking office in January, and said in the interview that his goal in Washington was not to be “everyone’s buddy,” but to “wage war on the entire political class.”  “The Democratic Party has been completely subsumed by this ‘What’s the Matter With Kansas,’ mantra,” Rose said. “‘Oooh, I don’t understand why they don’t vote for us? Why can’t they be smarter? Don’t they know all we are doing for them?’ It’s the most offensive, patronizing thing imaginable. And it’s taken over the party. A better question would be: Why don’t they trust us?”  Last week, Rose became the last member of Congress from New York City to back the House’s impeachment probe, saying he will “fully support” the inquiry.  The Army veteran, 31, was previously opposed to impeachment, arguing in a September op-ed that “we are in danger of losing the trust of the American people if we choose partisan warfare over improving the lives of hardworking families.”  Rose defended the impeachment inquiry to New York Magazine, but said he was not committed to voting for it, and criticized Democratic colleagues who have cheered it on.  “No one is to blame but the president. The president says he is innocent, so all we are saying is ‘prove it.’ But that is not what they are doing. They are not cooperating, and we need to get to the bottom of it. … This is a national tragedy. It is nothing to cheer on, it is nothing to sell T-shirts over,” he said.  Rose also stated he believes it was wrong for Hunter Biden, son of Joe Biden, to serve on the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma, which Trump suggested as a matter to investigate to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky on a July phone call.


nationalreview--2019-10-14--CNN’s Anti-Religious Town Hall

CNN’s Anti-Religious Town Hall

Billed an "equality" town hall, the CNN event was anything but.  LGBT activists gathered last week for CNN’s “Equality” town hall with the Democratic presidential candidates. The advocates present were, in the words of Human Rights Campaign President Alphonso David, the “tip of the spear in our fight for full equality.”  The “spear” metaphor grew more apt as the night went on.  Religious freedom was the second-most-popular whipping post. The candidates talked about the concept with palpable derision, as if religion — save Islam, which they predictably if incoherently exempted — were a ruse used to cement old prejudices. No one actually believes those folksy things about God, heaven, and hell, right? Never considered was the notion that people hold earnest religious beliefs that in turn inform their views on sexual morality.  The town hall was also evidence that the LGBTQ movement has grown more jaded and contemptuous, even as it has achieved more and more of its ostensible aims. If conciliation was ever the preferred tone, it is no longer. Instead, it is now increasingly unashamed and vituperative scorn.  How would Elizabeth Warren, for instance, respond to someone on the campaign trail who said that they believed in the traditional definition of marriage? “Well, I’m gonna assume it’s a guy who said that,” she said. That elicited a laugh from the audience, men being the only acceptable punchline to the humorless scolds in the crowd. She continued, “I’m gonna say then just marry one woman. I’m cool with that.” Then, after a pause: “If you can find one.”  Beto O’Rourke piled on further, affirming his belief that “freedom of religion is a fundamental right, but it should not be used to discriminate.”  You are, in other words, “free” to practice your religion, so long as you practice it in a manner that Beto O’Rourke — the skateboard-wielding ex-congressman who posts videos of his dental visits on social media — sees fit. Some animals are more equal than others: O’Rourke will be happy to “discriminate” against your church if it happens to hold an unpopular position on sexual ethics. He literally said so seconds later, when asked by Don Lemon if religious institutions should “lose their tax-exempt status if they oppose same sex marriage.” O’Rourke’s response:  What “human right” are religious organizations “infringing upon” when they “oppose” same-sex marriage? Do people have a “civil right” to have their sexual preferences validated by private religious organizations? Is there a “human right” to have your particular sexual union baptized by religious traditions with centuries of contravening theological directives?  Pete Buttigieg took this same tack, insisting that “the right to religious freedom ends where religion is being used as an excuse to harm other people.” Which of course depends entirely on what Buttigieg means by “harm.” There is certainly “harm,” for instance, in mutilating the genitals of a young girl — a more ecumenical venture than progressives care to admit — but does a baker’s refusal to bake a cake that violates his religious convictions “harm other people”? What if a church refuses to host a ceremony that offends its moral precepts? Does “religious freedom end” when someone refuses to grant moral approbation to someone else’s choices and behavior?  Indeed, that was the Freudian subtext of the entire town hall. “Equality?” That has, even on activists’ own terms, been long achieved. Notice, Alphonso David didn’t simply want “equality” — whatever that means — but “full equality”: your approval. Not simply your toleration, but your moral assent and your unhesitating affirmation. It’s not enough to live and let live. You will, in Erick Erickson’s words, “be made to care.”  First, we were told that good sense held that we ought to allow two consenting adults to do as they wished in the privacy of their own bedroom. Fair enough — what business is it of ours? Next came civil unions. Fine. Then, marriage was redefined at a federal level on the basis of specious legal reasoning. Next, religious florists, bakers, and caterers were asked to violate their consciences and dragged before the courts if they declined. And now, at long last, the public exercise of religious faith, and the very belief itself, the very notion that one has rights to “oppose” practices that violate their private conscience, are under siege.  All of which, we were told, would “never happen.” As the town hall put on display, it’s not for want of trying.


naturalnews--2019-10-13--Climate Hysteria CULT: Fear monger "Greta" proclaimed the "successor" to Jesus Christ by the Church

Climate Hysteria CULT: Fear monger "Greta" proclaimed the "successor" to Jesus Christ by the Church of Sweden

(Natural News) The official “Church of Sweden” has proclaimed climate eco-fascist Greta Thunberg to be the “successor” to Jesus Christ, proving once again that climate fanatics are members of a religious cult that worships the planet as a “god.”  Towards the end of last year, the Church of Limhamn tweeted a bizarre “Announcement!” about young Greta, blasphemously declaring that “Jesus of Nazareth has now appointed one of his successors, Greta Thunberg,” to spread the gospel of global warming throughout all the land – except in China, though, because the world’s biggest polluter is completely off-limits.  This disturbing tweet reemerged recently after Greta made her infamous appearance at the United Nations, where she looked everyone in the eye and said that her “message” to the world is simple: “We’ll be watching you.”  Before announcing her belief that the world is in the beginning stages of “a mass extinction,” Greta nastily yelled to the crowd, “How dare you!” referring to her delusion that adult leaders have somehow “come to us young people for hope.”  “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words and yet I’m one of the lucky ones,” an angry Greta went on to scream as if she was demon-possessed – just like Jesus did, apparently…  For more related news about the climate hoax that’s now being spread by children like Greta Thunberg, visit Climate.news.  Church of Sweden says its earlier reference to Greta Thunberg being a type of Second Coming of Christ was “misinterpreted”  Now that this tweet has resurfaced and gained global attention, the Church of Sweden is trying to play damage control by claiming that it didn’t actually mean what it said. According to this government-religious institution, the word “successor,” in this context, could mean other things.  Sponsored solution from the Health Ranger Store: Lab-verified Nascent Iodine solution is a dietary supplement that provides your body with supplemental iodine to help protect your thyroid during radiation exposure. Nuclear accidents such as Fukushima (or nuclear war) can expose your body to radioactive iodine-131, a dangerous radioisotope. Pre-loading your system with stable iodine occupies the iodine receptor sites on your organs, causing your body to naturally expel radioactive iodine you may have been exposed to through air, food, water or milk products. This defensive strategy is recommended by nearly all health authorities, worldwide, including the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Discover more at this link.  “Shortly after, the entire account was abandoned, with a sign-off message that defended the original celebration of Thunberg and suggested everyone has a right to interpret Jesus in their own way,” the Church of Sweden said in a statement, obviously responding to critics who were quick to point out the blasphemy of likening Greta Thunberg to Jesus Christ.  The Church of Sweden went on to apologize, adding that “if we have hurt someone … it has never been our meaning. Our meaning has been to talk about Jesus Christ in our own way. Now we leave the arena. Thank you for your commitment, joy and debate. God bless you!”  Greta herself has not responded to the controversy, nor have either of her parents, whom we reported are both aligned with the domestic terrorist group known as Antifa (anti-fascists).  Meanwhile, the mainstream media continues to worship Greta as if she really was Jesus in the flesh, noting that the 16-year-old climate fanatic is in the running for the Nobel Peace Prize.  According to the Nobel Committee, the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to the person or organization that has “done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”  Apparently Greta’s grandstanding at the U.N. with her prepared speech, followed by total confusion and silence when off-script, constitutes an act of “peace” in the eyes of the Nobel Prize committee these days.  “While the Lord Jesus Christ spoke the entire universe into existence, this poor little girl parroted a bunch of leftist brainwashing one-liners,” wrote one commenter at The Gateway Pundit.  “Mind control by the leftist controlled MSM (mainstream media) is a very powerful thing as can be illustrated by the demonic look on this little girl’s face.”


newsbusters--2019-06-14--Media Slime Novelist Nicholas Sparks As Racist Homophobe

It’s no big secret that the left openly targets Christianity for its views on marriage and gender. From the “Shame List” of faith-based colleges to the “Slate of Hate” of religious liberty bills, private religious institutions everywhere are smacked with the labels “hateful” and “bigotted” by the left-wing media. Now, bestselling romance novelist Nicholas Sparks is next to face the media’s branding iron.  In 2006, Nicholas Sparks co-founded The Epiphany School of Global Studies, a small Christian academy dedicated to the study of global issues in relation to the Christian teaching. Eight years after the school opened, former headmaster Saul Benjamin sued Sparks for an alleged pattern of harassment, bullying, and bigotry. Yesterday, The Daily Beast published leaked emails between Sparks and Benjamin that supposedly displayed Sparks’ homophobia.  In October 2013, Benjamin stated that he had reports of students bullying classmates for their sexual orientation. According to Benjamin, some of the students said that they wanted to start a “homo-caust.” Rumors started to circulate that Benjamin had formed an LGBT student club, a motion that the Board of Trustees immediately shutdown.  The following November, Benjamin claimed that two LGBT students planned a protest at the school’s chapel. The students planned to remove their clothes and paint their orientation on their bodies. Though Benjamin stopped the students' plan, the Board of Trustees was not happy about how Benjamin had been dealing with the situation. Not only did the board feel that Benjamin had been undermining the school’s Christian tradition, it had felt that Benjamin had unjustly attacked the school for a lack of diversity and inclusivity.  That same month, Sparks sent an email to Benjamin that partially read:  Another email from Sparks gave Benjamin a list of recommendations to deal with the school’s alleged homophobia. One recommendation advised Benjamin to work on his perceived arrogance, rudeness, and condescension. Some parents’ had feared that Benjamin was spreading views on homosexuality that were contrary to the school’s religious beliefs.  To address this, Sparks recommended that Benjamin use his own home to talk about LGBT issues with students in a small group setting, rather than speaking openly at school when tensions were high. The email also stated,  Regarding diversity, I’ve now told you half a dozen times that our lack of diversity has NOTHING to do with the school, or anyone at the school. It’s not because of what we as a school, has or hasn’t done. It has nothing to do with racism, or vestiges of Jim Crow.  In response to Benjamin’s accusations, Sparks gave a 29-page declaration to the court, and on Twitter, he posted a statement that denounced the headmaster’s claims as false, pointing out that some of the claims have already been dismissed. Unfortunately, Sparks did not give any additional comments to The Daily Beast. We’re left with only a one-sided perspective from The Daily Beast’s article -- a perspective from the man suing Sparks -- but this didn’t stop the media from jumping to conclusions.  Vice ran the headline “Throw Nicholas Sparks And ‘The Notebook’ Into The Trash.” The article attacked Sparks, stating “No amount of New York Times bestsellers or film adaptations can substitute for being a good person.” The A.V. Club’s headline read “Nicholas Sparks tried to ban an LGBTQ+ club and student protest from his school, like a villain in a book.” The report slammed The Notebook author, commenting “A romance writer not knowing a damn thing about actual love? Now there’s a twist.” Lara Parker -- a deputy editorial director for Buzzfeed -- simply tweeted “fuck nicholas sparks [sic].”  The lawsuit is finally scheduled for a six-day trial in August. You would think that after pushing the false “hands up, don’t shoot” slogan in the Michael Brown case, the media would have learned to hear all of the facts before passing judgement. However, Benjamin’s allegations fit too perfectly into the media’s narrative: Christian organizations are racist, sexist, bigotted, and homophobic.


pamelagellerreport--2019-11-15--Christian woman uses Christian doctrine to fight misogynistic, unequal Islamic inheritance laws in E

Christian woman uses Christian doctrine to fight misogynistic, unequal Islamic inheritance laws in Egypt

A Coptic Christian woman in Egypt is taking on the country’s unequal Islamic inheritance laws that mean female heirs inherit half that of men.  Huda Nasrallah, a 40-year-old human rights lawyer, has stood before three judges since her father passed away last year, demanding an equal share of the property left to her brothers.  Her brothers are in her corner, testifying on her behalf. But officials have ruled against her twice, citing Islamic laws that favor men.  “It is not really about inheritance, my father did not leave us millions of Egyptian pounds,” she said. “I have the right to ask to be treated equally as my brothers.”  Nasrallah has formulated her case around Christian doctrine that dictates heirs, regardless of their gender, receive equal shares, but the courts have chosen to use Islamic law as their justification.  In early December 2018, Nasrallah’s father, a former state clerk, died, leaving behind a four-story apartment building in a Cairo low-income neighborhood and a bank deposit. When she and her brothers filed their request for inheritance at a local court, Nasrallah invoked a church-sanctioned Coptic bylaw that calls for equal distribution of inheritance.  A final verdict is expected to be handed down later this month.  She hopes she will have the same outcome of a 2016 ruling from a Cairo court that favored a Coptic woman who also challenged Islamic inheritance laws. But recent cases and the sentiment in the nation don’t bode well for the minority believer.  After calls for equal inheritance rights were introduced in the Arab world, Egypt’s Al-Azhar, the highest Sunni religious institution in the Muslim world, vehemently dismissed the proposal as contradictory to Islamic law and destabilizing to Muslim societies, fearing that if the state offers equal property rights to Christian women that Muslim women will soon request the same.  As a lawyer, Nasrallah feels compelled to make her case and hopes to set a precedent for others at Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court.


pinknewsuk--2019-02-08--School cancels Black History Month event with lesbian speaker after protests

Signup to receive a daily roundup of the top LGBT+ news stories from around the world  A school in North Carolina reportedly cancelled a Black History Month event with a lesbian speaker after parents complained.  Immaculata Catholic School in Durham sent a letter to parents on Thursday (February 7) explaining that the school would be closed on Friday as a number of groups had planned protests over a Black History Month event it planned to host, reports WRAL.  In the letter, pastor Christopher VanHaight said that several organisations intended to demonstrate at the school because they were against Durham City councillor Vernetta Alston, a  lesbian, speaking at the event.  “As a pastor, I cannot place our Imaculata students into this contentious environment,” wrote VanHaight, reports WRAL.  Alston, a former pupil, posted an open letter on Twitter claiming that she and her colleagues “were uninvited to the school’s Black History Month celebration and that the event was altogether cancelled.”  “Immaculata is a religious institution and I believe strongly in the freedom to believe and worship how one chooses, even if a belief conflicts with something fundamental to my own life,” wrote Alston.  “That said, adherence to that basic principle means that I can freely say that the church, by depriving the students at Immaculata of the chance to honor black history, and in doing so, condemning the lives and rights of the LGTBQ community, is sending a sad, regressive, and life-altering message to our children.”  She added: “Let us use this moment to embrace the spirit of Black History Month and your celebration by letting the sacrifices we are being asked to make right now motivate us to examine our values, stand up for all the things we believe in even when we differ, and discover the strength in our shared history.”  Immaculata Catholic School has released no public statement over the event.  However, the school’s website states that the school campus is closed on Friday (February 8).  It also states that the “African American Heritage Celebration/Friday Morning Prayer” planned on February 8 is cancelled.  PinkNews has contacted Immaculata Catholic School and Alston for comment.