05/27/15

Catholic Group Exposes Red Influence in the Vatican

Doing the research and investigative work that the major U.S. media have all but abandoned, an organization called the American Life League (ALL) has uncovered dramatic evidence of links between the highest levels of the Roman Catholic Church and an international communist group known as the World Social Forum. The evidence suggests overt Marxist influence on the climate change movement that Pope Francis and his top advisers are now embracing.

The ALL report, a 76-page PowerPoint presentation complete with original source material and numerous photographs, documents how Caritas Internationalis, the Vatican’s top social justice organization, is actually “providing leadership” to the communist group.

The report’s author, Michael Hichborn, stated, “This is a very serious problem. Given how intimately connected the World Social Forum (WSF) has been with the promotion of communism, abortion, and homosexuality since the very beginning, it’s impossible to see how any Catholic can participate in it, or even speak positively about it, let alone have any involvement in its governance. But Caritas Internationalis does!”

These allegations can’t be dismissed as anti-Catholic bigotry, since the American Life League is itself a Catholic organization that has been working for years to expose Catholic funds and organizations that promote causes at variance with official Catholic teaching.

However, Hichborn tells Accuracy in Media that except for specialized publications such as Lifesitenews, the media have ignored the report.

The ALL report on the WSF includes eye-opening photographs from the group’s events, featuring open displays of communist flags and banners as well as images of such personalities as Lenin, Castro and Mao.

Most of our media, of course, reported on the “death” of communism after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

But the ALL report notes that “There can be no mistaking the materialist and revolutionary (Communist) nature of the forum itself, which sets it in opposition to the Catholic Church.”

Hichborn told AIM that he delivered a copy of the report to the Vatican office known as Cor Unum, but that nothing came of it, and that one Vatican official concerned about the issue was relieved of his duties.

ALL identifies the other Catholic groups involved in the activities of the WSF as Pax Christi, Center of Concern, Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, Catholic Relief Services and CIDSE, an international alliance of Catholic development agencies.

An independent review of the ALL report confirms the research into the links between Caritas Internationalis and the WSF. In fact, a document on the Caritas website still affirms that “Caritas has been involved in the WSF since its beginnings. Caritas believes it’s an opportunity to exchange ideas and to build the momentum towards real change.”

After the ALL report was released, a conference at the Vatican was sponsored by Caritas Internationalis that featured Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia University professor and Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, and Gustavo Gutierrez, the father of Marxist-oriented Liberation Theology.

As Accuracy in Media reported, Sachs wrote an article for the Jesuit publication America attacking the “American idea” of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as narrow and selfish. He suggests that America’s founding document is outmoded and incompatible with his idea of Catholic teaching about social justice.

Sachs is an advocate of global taxes to extract hundreds of billions of dollars from the American people in order to finance some form of world government. The climate change movement, based on dubious science, is the most popular current vehicle that Sachs and others can use to bring this about.

Seizing on Sachs’ extraordinary remarks in a major Catholic publication, the well-known writer Edward Cline comments on the Family Security Matters website that “It would take a village—or, at least, the ‘global’ one—to subjugate and sack America. That is what is being proposed by Jeffrey Sachs.”

The Cline piece carries the title, “The ‘Sach-ing’ of America,” and he concludes that “In its essentials, Sachs’ plan for the future sacking of America differs little from Islam’s.”

In short, the American way of life is at risk, this time from a Vatican alliance with America’s academic elites and the U.N.

The World Social Forum itself just held another international conference focusing on one aspect of the Sachs agenda: global taxes. The WSF announced the launch of the Global Alliance for Tax Justice, including a statement that “Our vision entails progressive redistributive taxation polices that fund the vital public services, end inequality and poverty, address climate change and lead to sustainable development.”

The topic fits nicely with the expected papal encyclical on climate change.

At the Caritas conference, Pope Francis adviser Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga said that critics of the proposed papal document are advocates of an “ideology” that he concludes “is too tied to a capitalism that doesn’t want to stop ruining the environment because they don’t want to give up their profits.”

Critics are concerned because of the pope’s several statements indicating hostility to the system of capitalism and free markets that has brought prosperity to hundreds of millions of people.

This kind of Marxist rhetoric from a top Vatican adviser makes it appear as if the pope has aligned himself with an ideology that, despite the “collapse” of communism, is still very much alive, and which the Black Book of Communism says has already claimed 100 million lives.

The recent cordial Francis visit with Cuban dictator Raul Castro only adds to the growing concern.

“Pope Francis will give us his encyclical letter on ecology,” said Maradiaga, anticipating its impact. “This year is a unique opportunity to take responsibility for the future of our world and the lives of future generations.”

The title of the Caritas conference was, “One Human Family, Caring for Creation.” But it appears that the “caring” part lies in replacing capitalism with structures of “global governance” that involve a massive transfer of political and economic power to international organizations like the United Nations.

After Maradiaga stepped down, he was replaced by Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle of Manila, Philippines, as the new president of Caritas Internationalis. But Maradiaga continues as the coordinator of a group of nine cardinals that serves as Francis’s Council of Cardinals.

01/13/15

Why Was Putin a No-show in Paris?

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

With good reason, media attention has been focused on President Barack Obama’s curious absence from the Paris march against terrorism. Obama became a “Where’s Waldo?” character, whose whereabouts were unknown. Observers looked for him at the march of world leaders in France, hoping to spot him somewhere. But where was Russian leader Vladimir Putin? This may have been the bigger story.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, a source of concern in Europe, may have been a factor in his absence. But it’s also true that Putin has documented pro-terrorist credentials that should have made him persona non grata at any such event. Instead, Putin sent Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to Paris to represent his regime.

Putin was a KGB spy for many years and ran the FSB, the successor to the KGB, which trained the notorious terrorist once based in France known as Carlos the Jackal. Carlos, a name given to him because of his roots in Latin America, has been linked to communist-run international terror networks that always had an Islamic component and a strategy in the Middle East that includes the destruction of Israel.

The name “Carlos the Jackal” is well-known globally because he was the reported godfather behind such attacks as the murders of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, and the seizure of hostages at a meeting of the oil-producing countries, known as OPEC, in Vienna in 1975. But less well-known is the international terrorist support network organized by the Soviet Union and Cuba which backed him.

President Obama may want people to believe that Russia and Cuba are no longer involved in terrorism, but hearings conducted by Congress in the 1980s, such as “The Role of Cuba in International Terrorism and Subversion,” cannot be ignored. Castro was given a role in the “Liberation of Palestine” account made by the KGB, the hearings showed, as well as promoting communism in Latin America and Africa.

Before that, in 1974, the House Committee on Internal Security produced a report, “Terrorism: A Staff Study,” analyzing Soviet, Chinese and Cuban support for international terrorism.

Today, the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) now runs the West Bank, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) continues to call Israel the “Zionist/Imperialist Project,” a typical Soviet term.

Tragically, the Senate and House committees or subcommittees on security and terrorism were dismantled and there is no such body in Congress today that specifically examines international terrorist activity and its U.S. support networks.

Former KGB officers and intelligence analysts say the PLO was created by the Soviet KGB, and that the PLO’s long-time chairman, Yasser Arafat, was an agent of the Soviet intelligence service.

Indeed, Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking defector from the former Soviet bloc, says KGB dissident Alexander Litvinenko, who was living in London, was killed by the KGB because he spilled the beans on how Soviet intelligence spawned Islamic terrorism and trained al-Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri.

But there is another fascinating aspect to the story that brings this matter up to date. Although a Marxist terrorist for much of his life, Carlos converted to Islam and is now serving a life sentence in a prison in France. He announced in 2003 that he had pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden.

While Obama seems preoccupied with the rights of terrorists and whether they are being treated properly, French Special Forces kidnapped Carlos in Sudan in 1994 using a practice known as “rendition,” a practice used by the Bush administration against terrorists that has only reluctantly been embraced by the Obama administration.

In what Obama might describe as a violation of his terrorist “rights,” Carlos was reportedly injected with a tranquilizer, bound, stuffed into a sack, and transferred to France, where he was put on trial, convicted of murder, and sentenced to life in prison.

Putin, in response to the Charlie Hedbo massacre, said through a spokesman, “Moscow strongly condemns terrorism in all its manifestations,” adding, “Moscow is sure that no terrorist acts can be justified.”

Moscow’s words need to be “parsed,” as the saying goes.

The American author Claire Sterling’s 1981 book, The Terror Network: The Secret War of International Terrorism, still stands as the authoritative analysis of the international terror networks that emerged in the late 1960s under the sponsorship of Russia and Cuba. Carlos was a key Soviet KGB operative in this effort.

Sterling identifies Carlos as someone who was under KGB control and running a terror network directly out of Paris in 1974 and 1975. He killed two French agents who tried to capture him and fled France, moving around in various Arab countries and what was then East Germany, where a young KGB spy by the name of Vladimir Putin would be based. Carlos continued carrying out attacks in France and other nations through his terror network.

Carlos was born in Venezuela as Ilich Ramirez Sanchez. His first name was given by his Marxist parents as a tribute to Soviet communist leader Vladimir Ilych Lenin. Carlos “studied” at Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, notes Jill Dougherty, once CNN’s Moscow Bureau Chief.

In fact, according to former KGB officers, the “university” was essentially run by the KGB, which used it to recruit foreign students as agents or terrorists.

The authoritative Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, which was published in France, states categorically that Carlos worked for the KGB, carrying out terrorist activities on its behalf.

Carlos also “studied” at the Tricontinental Conference in Havana in 1966. A conference of this kind and scope, Sterling wrote, “had never been seen since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and the world would never be the same.” She noted that its “General Declaration” urged close collaboration between the Soviet-style “Socialist countries” and the “national liberation movements,” in order to mount “a global revolutionary strategy” against “American imperialism.”

This is the strategy that resulted in hundreds of acts of terrorism across Europe and in the United States through such groups as the Weather Underground and the Puerto Rican FALN.

Numerous reports put Carlos at the KGB-supervised Cuban terrorist training camp known as Mantanzas, where he “studied” guerrilla warfare, sabotage techniques and bomb-making.

Former KGB agents, including Alexander Litvinenko and Konstantin Preobrazhensky, confirmed published accounts that Carlos was in fact an agent of the KGB. The 1991 book, KGB: The Inside Story, by Christopher Andrew and former KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky, also confirms his terrorist training by the Soviets and Cubans.

Interestingly, when a TV movie was aired in 2010 about Carlos the terrorist, the Kremlin propaganda channel Russia Today (RT) ran a story saying his KGB connections were murky and had been “questioned” by the movie director. However, the director of the film did say, “He (Carlos) grew up in a Marxist family in Venezuela; his parents sent him to Lumumba University in Moscow; then he was expelled from the university for bad behavior. Then he re-emerges with a gun in his hand in Jordan at the side of the Palestinian from the PFLP, led by Wadih Haddad, who was a KGB agent. So what exactly were the KGB connections of Carlos? It’s a very difficult subject.”

The director was quoted as saying, “it is debatable whether Carlos the Jackal, a supporter of radical Islamism, had KGB connections.”

Such a claim only makes sense from the perspective of a network that serves Putin’s propaganda interests and wants to distance Moscow from the carnage the Soviets inflicted, with the collaboration of the Cuban communists, on Europe and the United States.

The KGB connections of Carlos went far beyond the PFLP. What’s more, the late Herbert Romerstein, an expert on security and terrorism, had noted that the “expulsion” from Lumumba University was a diversion. He said that Carlos had left Moscow with a letter of introduction from a representative of the PFLP stationed in Moscow, and had joined that Soviet-backed Arab terrorist organization.

Carlos is in prison, but Mahmoud Abbas, the chairman of the PLO, has a similar background. . Abbas, who is also president of the Palestinian Authority, did his Ph.D. work at the KGB’s Patrice Lumumba University, where he wrote a report claiming that there was no Holocaust, and that the Jews murdered during World War II were actually killed by Zionists working with the Nazis.

The Obama and Putin no-shows in Paris were eclipsed by the attendance of Abbas, who is now seen internationally as someone opposed to the terrorism his organization has sponsored and carried out for decades. It was a clever propaganda display that Putin must have enjoyed.