07/25/15

The Religious Origins of the Sanctuary Movement

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

Thanks to Donald Trump, the major media are being forced to cover the illegal immigration movement, such as the proliferation of “sanctuary cities” across the U.S. that attract criminal aliens, give them legal protection, and let them back out on the streets to commit more crimes. But the really taboo topic is how these sanctuary cities grew out of a movement started by the Catholic Church and other churches.

Over 200 cities, counties and states provide safe-haven to illegal aliens as sanctuary cities, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) reports. What has not yet been reported is that the Catholic Church, which gave President Obama his start in “community organizing” in Chicago, has been promoting the sanctuary movement for more than two decades.

What’s more, in April, a delegation of U.S. Catholic bishops staged a church service along the U.S.-Mexico border and distributed Communion through the border fence. At the same time, Pope Francis said a “racist and xenophobic” attitude was keeping immigrants out of the United States.

No wonder the pope’s approval ratings have been falling in the United States.  Overall, Gallup reports that it’s now at 59 percent, down from 76 percent in early 2014. Among conservatives, it’s fallen from 72 percent approval to 45 percent (a drop of 27 points).

“Few people are aware that this extreme left branch of the Catholic Church played a large part in birthing the sanctuary movement,” says James Simpson, author of the new book, The Red-Green Axis: Refugees, Immigration and the Agenda to Erase America.

Simpson says Catholic Charities, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and its grant-making arm, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, are prominent elements of the open borders movement.

The sanctuary movement has its roots in the attempted communist takeover of Latin America.

With the support of elements of the Roman Catholic Church, the Communist Sandinistas had taken power in Nicaragua in 1979. At the time, communist terrorists known as the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) were threatening a violent takeover of neighboring El Salvador. President Ronald Reagan’s policies of overt and covert aid for the Nicaraguan freedom fighters, known as the Contras, forced the defeat of the Sandinistas, leaving the FMLN in disarray. In 1983, Reagan ordered the liberation of Grenada, an island in the Caribbean, from communist thugs.

Groups like the Marxist-oriented Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) were promoting the sanctuary movement for the purpose of facilitating the entry into the U.S. of illegal aliens who were supposedly being repressed by pro-American governments and movements in the region. The U.S. Catholic Bishops openly supported the sanctuary movement, even issuing a statement in 1985 denouncing the criminal indictments of those caught smuggling illegal aliens and violating the law.  Section 274 of the Immigration and Nationality Act prohibits the transportation or harboring of illegal aliens.

Two Roman Catholic priests and three nuns were among those under indictment in one case on 71 counts of conspiracy to smuggle illegal aliens into the United States. One of the Catholic priests indicted in the scheme was Father Ramon Dagoberto Quinones, a Mexican citizen. He was among those convicted of conspiracy in the case.

Illegal alien rally

Through the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, an arm of the Bishops, the church has funded Casa de Maryland, an illegal alien support group which was behind the May 1, 2010, “May Day” rally in Washington, D.C. in favor of “immigrant rights.” Photographs taken by this writer showed Mexican immigrants wearing Che Guevara T-shirts, and Spanish-language communist books and literature being provided to rally participants.

Illegal alien rally 2

An academic paper, “The Acme of the Catholic Left: Catholic Activists in the US Sanctuary Movement, 1982-1992,” states that lay Catholics and Catholic religious figures were “active participants” in the network protecting illegals. The paper said, “Near the peak of national participation in August 1988, of an estimated 464 sanctuaries around the country, 78 were Catholic communities—the largest number provided by any single denomination.”

A “New Sanctuary Movement” emerged in 2007, with goals similar to the old group. In May, the far-left Nation magazine ran a glowing profile of this new movement, saying it was “revived” by many of the same “communities of faith” and churches behind it in the 1980s.

One group that worked to find churches that would provide sanctuary to immigrants in fear of deportation is called Interfaith Worker Justice, led by Kim Bobo, who was quoted by PBS in 2007 as saying, “We believe what we are doing is really calling forth a higher law, which is really God’s law, of caring for the immigrant.”

But conservative Catholic Michael Hichborn of the Lepanto Institute says Interfaith Worker Justice is run by “committed Marxist socialists,” and that Bobo is “highly active and involved with the Democratic Socialists of America,” a group which backed Obama’s political career.

07/3/15

Exposing Hollywood Pedophiles

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

Director Amy Berg exposed the cover-up of pedophilia in the Catholic Church in her 2006 Oscar-nominated documentary, “Deliver Us from Evil.” On Friday night, July 3, New Yorkers can see her new explosive documentary on how pedophiles operate in Hollywood and cover up their crimes. Her film, “An Open Secret,” is being shown at the Cinema Village at 22 East 12th Street in New York City.

Several journalists are included in the film, with one describing his attempt to document the sexual crimes committed by top Hollywood figures and how his story exposing this criminal conduct was killed.

Even more shocking, director Berg was quoted as saying last November that she could not find any company willing to distribute her film.

That has changed with the showing on Friday night in New York, and the opening in the Los Angeles area on July 17 at Laemmle’s Music Hall in Beverly Hills.

Rocky Mountain Pictures, the distributor behind such ground-breaking conservative-oriented documentaries as “Obama 2016,” has stepped up to make sure this important film gets released in various cities throughout the summer. (Vesuvio Entertainment is also helping with distribution of the film.) The film is rated R, meaning those under 17 must be accompanied by a parent or adult guardian.

It includes interviews with victims and identifies by name those who have been caught, prosecuted and convicted for sexual abuse. The film identifies a pedophile ring once led by a convicted sex offender named Marc Collins-Rector, who had ties to the rich and famous in Hollywood.

Collins-Rector established an Internet-based TV company called Digital Entertainment Network (DEN), whose investors reportedly included movie director Bryan Singer, David Geffen and Arianna Huffington’s ex-husband Michael Huffington.

The company’s first show, “Chad’s World,” was described by the Los Angeles Times as centering “on a 15-year-old from Michigan who questions his sexual orientation and ultimately flees his town’s intolerance to move in with a gay couple in a California mansion.” This and other questionable DEN projects are discussed in the Berg film.

It’s impossible for critics to dismiss the sensational charges in the film, since Berg has a reputation as someone who meticulously documented a film about a Catholic priest and serial child molester who served in a number of parishes in Southern California. That film, “Deliver Us from Evil,” was nominated for an Academy Award. What’s more, several characters in addition to Collins-Rector who are named in the film have been convicted of sexual abuse.

Conservatives may not like parts of the film, since it attempts to separate the rampant homosexuality in Hollywood from the pedophilia that is described in excruciating detail. But there is no doubt that Hollywood is an industry dominated by homosexuals, some of whom don’t want this film to be seen by the American people.

The claim that the film is not about homosexuality, but rather pedophilia and child abuse, is strictly true. However, all of the cases described in the film involve adult males molesting boys. What’s more, the founder of the modern gay rights movement, Harry Hay, was a supporter of the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA).

Comedian and author Adam Corolla has described the existence of a gay “mafia” in Hollywood that determines whether movies get made, and what can be said about them and their influence in the industry.

At the same time, the recent revelations in the Dennis Hastert case suggest that pedophilia is a problem that crosses ideological and political lines. Hastert, the former Republican House Speaker, has been indicted on federal charges of lying to the FBI about an alleged money-laundering scheme which was apparently designed to cover up the case of an innocent child sexually abused by Hastert when he was a high-school wrestling coach.

Another alleged victim, a student by the name of Steve Reinboldt, told his sister Jolene that his first homosexual sex experience was with then-coach Hastert. The boy was apparently abused throughout his high school years and later embraced a “gay” identity, before dying of AIDS at the young age of 42, in 1995.

A New York Times review of “An Open Secret” notes that “some of the culprits, we’re told, still work in Hollywood,” and that “further aggressive reporting is needed.” The Times adds, “This topic deserves a tenacious call for answers.”

This is certainly the case. But while more reporting is absolutely necessary, it is important in the first place to make sure people around the country have an opportunity to see the film.