02/23/16

Justice Scalia Was More Catholic Than the Pope

By: Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media

On Saturday night, a lunatic by the name of Jason Brian Dalton went on a weekend killing spree in Michigan. The next day, contradicting the official Catholic Catechism, Pope Francis called for the worldwide abolition of the death penalty.

The pope doesn’t have to worry about Dalton getting the electric chair or a lethal injection. Michigan does not have the death penalty, which means Dalton, even if convicted of murder, will be entitled to a life at taxpayers’ expense—complete with three meals a day, free health care and cable TV.

On the same day that the pope spoke out against capital punishment, the late Justice Antonin Scalia, a Catholic, was laid to rest. Scalia had said that judges who oppose capital punishment should resign. But that’s not a contradiction of church teaching. Article 2267 of the Catholic catechism, an authoritative compendium of church teaching, says the church “does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives” against criminals.

Scalia said the death penalty is not immoral and noted that support for it has been part of Christian and Catholic tradition in the old and new testaments.

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10/2/15

Media Come to Defense of Killer

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

You may have noticed the news that trust in the media remains at an all-time low. As if to drive that figure even lower, CNN was busy much of Tuesday afternoon trying to spare a killer from the death penalty on the false grounds that Catholicism forbids capital punishment.

No wonder our media are held in such disregard.

CNN’s Vatican senior correspondent John Allen said, “You know, the Catholic Church has a long history of opposing the death penalty.”

False. Section 2267 of the Catholic Catechism says, “The traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude, presupposing full ascertainment of the identity and responsibility of the offender, recourse to the death penalty, when this is the only practicable way to defend the lives of human beings effectively against the aggressor.”

On a website called Crux, which covers “all things Catholic” and for which Allen serves as associate editor, we find an article noting, “The Church doesn’t teach that the death penalty is immoral, but says it should only be used in rare circumstances when the state has no other way to protect society from violent offenders.”

So why did Allen mislead his CNN audience?

Speaking to anchor Brooke Baldwin, CNN’s Allen went on, “It was as far back as 1969 that Pope Paul VI urged the abolition of the death penalty and every pope since has upheld the same tradition. I think the interesting thing, as you say, is that Pope Francis was just in the United States, got a rousing ovation from Congress, was widely hailed by political authorities up and down the country. This is sort of the first test, Brooke, as to whether those people who were cheering the pope’s presence are also going to be willing to act on his concrete agenda.”

The popes or the bishops and cardinals can have their own personal opinions, but the fact is that the teaching of the church does NOT forbid capital punishment. He knows this.

The Catholic Answers website notes that both the Old Testament (Genesis 9:6) and the New Testament (Romans 13:4) seemingly endorse the death penalty.

The Ellicott’s Bible commentary notes that the phrase “To bear the sword” from Romans seems to be a recognized Greek phrase to express the power of the magistrates. “It is clear from this passage that capital punishment is sanctioned by Scripture,” the commentary says.

So Allen had the facts wrong and wanted “those people who were cheering the pope’s presence” in the U.S. to accept his personal plea but disregard church teaching. This distortion is one reason why people don’t trust the media.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia notes that support for the death penalty has been part of Christian and Catholic tradition in the Old and New Testaments. What’s more, it was morally accepted when the U.S. Constitution was adopted. Scalia recently told a group of students, “If the death penalty did not violate the Eighth Amendment when the Eighth Amendment was adopted, it doesn’t violate it today.”

The Supreme Court has formally ruled that the death penalty is not a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. What’s more, in June, the Court in a 5-4 ruling upheld the use of a particular drug for lethal injection in executions.

In the case at issue on CNN and other media on Tuesday, a woman named Kelly Gissendaner was given the death penalty by lethal injection because she ordered the murder of her husband, Douglas Gissendaner, in 1997. Her lover, Gregory Bruce Owen, stabbed her husband to death.

The family of Douglas Gissendaner issued a statement, noting, “Kelly planned and executed Doug’s murder. She targeted him and his death was intentional. Kelly chose to have her day in court and after hearing the facts of this case, a jury of her peers sentenced her to death… As the murderer, she’s been given more rights and opportunity over the last 18 years than she ever afforded to Doug who, again, is the victim here. She had no mercy, gave him no rights, no choices, nor the opportunity to live his life. His life was not hers to take.”

Despite media opposition to the death penalty, the majority of Americans still support it. Pew found that 56% favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder, while 38% are opposed.

Pew did find declining support for the death penalty among Democrats, helping to explain why the Democrats masquerading as journalists in the media oppose it. Pew explained, “Much of the decline in support over the past two decades has come among Democrats. Currently, just 40% of Democrats favor the death penalty, while 56% are opposed. In 1996, Democrats favored capital punishment by a wide margin (71% to 25%).”

Among Republicans it found that 77% favor the death penalty. Among independents the figure was 57% supporting capital punishment.

In addition to their liberal opposition to the death penalty, the media perceived a sexist angle in this case, since Gissendaner “became Georgia’s first female prisoner to be executed in 70 years,” as CNN put it, or “the only woman on Georgia’s death row,” as noted by The Washington Post.

Prior to the pope’s U.S. visit, CNN’s John Allen had written that “Francis knows that the death penalty is controversial in the United States, and that a strong camp in the American Catholic Church passionately defends it. Looking ahead to his trip here in September, this could be one of those moments in which discretion seems the better part of valor. On the other hand, it’s also a chance for Francis to show that he’s serious about the death penalty by saying something he knows full well many Americans, including some members of his own flock, don’t want to hear.”

As noted, Francis did condemn the death penalty before Congress. However, as a result of Georgia carrying out the ultimate punishment in the Kelly Gissendaner case, it appears that the pope’s influence in this area has been shown to be non-existent. He had actually pleaded for Georgia authorities to spare her life in a last-minute letter.

The credibility of the pope is a problem, since his personal views are contrary to church teaching and Georgia authorities ignored him anyway. But John Allen’s misrepresentation of the facts hurt his own credibility and that of the media, whose trustworthiness can only continue to decline.

09/25/15

Pope Lays Out Global Marxist Agenda

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

Socialist Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is ecstatic over the pope’s address to Congress. In a message to his supporters, titled, “Why we must listen to Pope Francis,” he was particularly pleased with the fact that in his address to Congress, “Pope Francis spoke of Dorothy Day, who was a tireless advocate for the impoverished and working people in America. I think it was extraordinary that he cited her as one of the most important people in recent American history.” Day was a Marxist apologist for socialism and communist regimes. We covered this territory in my column, “With Pope’s Help, U.N. Bypasses Congress on Global Socialism.”

With Republican congressional leaders under fire from conservatives for cowering in the face of a Democratic Party onslaught, all that they needed was to roll out the welcome mat for a Marxist pope who would put them further on the defensive. But that’s exactly what happened.

Phyllis Bennis of the Marxist Institute for Policy Studies was right: “Pope Francis’ address to Congress was almost certainly not what John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and other congressional leaders had in mind when they invited the pope to speak.” Speaking for many on the left, including the pro-abortion lobby,she said, “His clear call to end the death penalty was the only example he gave of protecting the sanctity of life: Even amid a raging congressional debate over Planned Parenthood, he never mentioned abortion.”

The list of left-wing causes in the pope’s address was extensive. Bennis noted “his calls to protect the rights of immigrants and refugees, end the death penalty, preserve the planet from the ravages of climate change, and defend the poor and dispossessed.” And then there was the attack on the policies of peace through strength, which keep us free. “Being at the service of dialogue and peace also means being truly determined to minimize and, in the long term, to end the many armed conflicts throughout our world,” the pope said. He then asked, “Why are deadly weapons being sold to those who plan to inflict untold suffering on individuals and society?”

He should ask that of Vladimir Putin.

Most Americans understand the rationale for legal immigrants. But illegal aliens who commit crimes are something else. The pope seems not to recognize a difference.

The death penalty is a punishment reserved for heinous killers. But he doesn’t mention abortion, which has taken tens of millions of innocent lives. This seemed strange to conservative Catholics, who are starting to come to grips with the fact that this is a “progressive” pope, who is not hostile toward what anti-communist Pope John Paul II called the “culture of death” through population control and reduction.

Francis’s answer on the arms control issue was to challenge the United States alone and blame its spending on national defense on monetary motives. “Sadly, the answer, as we all know, is simply for money: money that is drenched in blood, often innocent blood,” said the pope. “In the face of this shameful and culpable silence, it is our duty to confront the problem and to stop the arms trade.”

That’s a slander of our brave fighting men and women, many of whom have given their lives or sacrificed their limbs to bring freedom to people around the word, especially Muslims in such places as Iraq and Afghanistan.

Against the global Jihad, what does the pope expect the U.S. to do? Disarm?

Praising “his uniquely progressive papal perspective,” far-left radio host Amy Goodman noted that “The pope has been frank in his criticism of much of the core of U.S. society: capitalism, consumerism, war and the failure to confront climate change.” This is a fraud, of course. They used to warn us against global cooling. It then became global warming and now climate change. The cause always changes until they find something to lure people into schemes for bigger government and higher taxes.

Recognizing the socialism of the pope, Al Jazeera posted an article, “Bernie Sanders, the pope and the moral imperative of systemic change,” by Gar Alperovitz, the co-chair with James Gustave Speth of The Next System Project. Speth, former administrator of the United Nations Development Program, put his name on its 1994 “Human Development Report,” which openly promoted global taxes for world government.

The “Next System” is another name for the replacement of global capitalism by global socialism.

Those endorsing this project, in addition to Alperovitz and Speth, include:

Jane Mansbridge, Harvard University
Gerald Hudson, Service Employees International Union
Annie Leonard, Greenpeace USA
Robert B. Reich, University of California at Berkeley
Dean Baker, Center for Economic and Policy Research
Barbara Ehrenreich, Author
Jeffrey D. Sachs, Columbia University
Gerald Torres, Cornell University Law School
Larry Cohen, Communications Workers of America
Julie Matthaei, Cornerstone Cohousing
Leo Gerard, United Steelworkers
John James Conyers, Jr., 13th District, Michigan
Bill McKibben, 350.org
Saskia Sassen, Columbia University
Frances Fox Piven, City University of New York
Manuel Pastor, University of Southern California
Phillip Thompson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Oliver Stone, Academy Award-winning Filmmaker
Medea Benjamin, CODEPINK
Timothy E. Wirth, United Nations Foundation and Better World Fund
Sarita Gupta, Jobs With Justice
Noam Chomsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Van Jones, The Dream Corps & Rebuild The Dream
Lawrence Mishel, Economic Policy Institute
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, California State University
Daniel Ellsberg, Author
Herman E. Daly, University of Maryland
Ralph Nader, Consumer Advocate, Author, Former Presidential Candidate
Ai-jen Poo, National Domestic Workers Alliance
Anna Galland, MoveOn.org Civic Action
Danny Glover, Actor, Social Activist
Tom Morello, Musician, Activist
Jill Stein, 2012 Green Party Presidential Nominee
Nancy Fraser, New School for Social Research

“We have fundamental problems because of fundamental flaws in our economic and political system,” the New Project proclaims. “The crisis now unfolding in so many ways across our country amounts to a systemic crisis. Today’s political economic system is not programmed to secure the wellbeing of people, place and planet. Instead, its priorities are corporate profits, the growth of GDP, and the projection of national power.”

The group goes on, “Large-scale system change is needed but has until recently been constrained by a continuing lack of imagination concerning social, economic and political alternatives. There are alternatives that can lead to the systemic change we need.”

Yes there are. They are called socialism and communism. But they would rather call it “sustainable development,” in order to confuse people about how the American way of life is being targeted for extinction.

06/10/15

Will the Sharia save Morsi?

By: Ashraf Ramelah
Voice of the Copts

death-sentence

Just three weeks ago the Egyptian court sentenced Egypt’s former Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohammed Morsi, to the death penalty after evidence presented from Egyptian intelligence documents proved him guilty of spying for Qatar, Iran and Turkey.

There are more than one hundred names on the list with him who are all convicted of the same crimes: murdering protesters, transferring top secret military documents to foreign countries, and burning the museum library which destroyed rare manuscripts and ancient artifacts.

Included on the death-penalty list is Mohamed Badie, the former Muslim Brotherhood spiritual head and his two deputies, Khairat El-Shater and Mahmud Ezzat, as well as Yousef Al Qaradawy, Hamas’ spiritual leader now living in Qatar.

As required by Egyptian law, the Egyptian court directly transmitted the list of the sentenced to the Grand Mufti of Cairo for his pronouncement of the Sharia opinion (approval) on the court’s verdict and sentencing. This past week, a few hours before the court resumed on June 2, a sealed envelope was passed to the court containing the Grand Mufti’s decision.

The court postponed the June 2 proceedings until June 16, and the envelope remains sealed at this moment. Some say the court did so to protect the country and President Al-Sisi who was in Germany on June 2 — waiting for his return in case violence erupts as a result of the announcement.

What are the chances that the Mufti has approved the death penalty? After all, the hundred or so Morsi aides and accomplices condemned to death along with the former president are guilty of nothing more than consistency with the cleric’s ideological and religious views.

If the death penalty is not approved and the civil court ignores the disapproval and goes forward to implement the death penalty, this could mean that the court is secured by the backing and protection of the President in order to serve justice. This in turn reveals that Al-Sisi is truly willing and able to go forward with cleaning corruption and rolling back religious extremism in an effort to reform the country.

But Al-Sisi is a mystery. He recently gave a statement to the German press indicating his agreement with the official story of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood wherein Morsi was elected fairly and democratically and won with 55 percent of the vote. This is very odd since Al-Sisi’s own legitimacy as the people’s president rests on the opposite view — the well-known truth that Morsi became president through corrupt elections, violence, fraud, and outside interference.

The second alternative would be for the civil court to comply with the Grand Mufti’s disapproval of the death sentences, subjecting itself to the authority of the religious clerics which is current practice. In an unreformed Egypt this can be expected from the court.

If we find that the Mufti has approved the death sentences, we are experiencing Al-Sisi’s power for the first time within his term of office and know as well that he is genuine. If so, the promise of modern reform has real potential, and Al-Sisi will have succeeded in spite of outside pressures (Merkel, Obama, and the CIA), Egypt’s political legacy (Mubarak, Sadat, and Nasser) and religious ultra-conservatives threatening secular initiatives (Salafists, Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Ahzar Institute).

The Coptic minority remains under the same pressures today as during previous administrations ruling Egypt. Muslim supremacies prevail, often with violence, against the sub-class within Egypt’s population. Al-Sisi, the man and the president, is yet a sign of hope for the country – Muslim and Christian watch Al-Sisi teetering between positions usually by omissions but not defaulting to the comfortable pattern of his predecessors.