Pope to pray for Terrorists at Ground Zero

[xmasdale]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/04/12/wpope1 12.xml


excerpt from 'Pope will pray for terrorists at Ground Zero'

by Malcolm Moore, Daily Telegraph, 12 April 2008

The Pope will pray for the redemption of Islamic terrorists when he visits the site of the September 11 attacks in New York next week.


Aircraft will be banned from flying under 3,000 feet
while the Pope is at Ground Zero


The pontiff will call for terrorists to convert to Christianity, saying: "Turn to Your way of love those whose hearts and minds are consumed with hatred.

"God of understanding, overwhelmed by the magnitude of this tragedy, we seek your light and guidance".

The prayer is likely to further incense the Muslim world, which has already attacked the Pope for publicly converting Magdi Allam, a journalist and one of Italy's most high-profile Muslims, at Easter.

[outsider]

I don't know if their is any truth in the rumour that the Anti-Defamation League is to sue the Pope for referring to Neo-Cons as 'Islamic Terrorists', on the grounds that with the Vatican's excellent 'Intelligence', they must know who were the real culprits, and to refer to them as 'Islamic' is a defamation too far.
With any luck, he may also pray for the conversion of the 'Dancing Israelis' as well:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/04/12/wpope1 12.xml

[TonyGosling]

Well, vicars and bishops have been praying for our leaders every Sunday as long as I can remember. Maybe they know there are Blackwater and Hallibuton as well as foreign terrorist moles inside our government so this is a prayer for them?

Isn't David Milliband a Terrorist? His mouth appears to splurt nothing but lies, lies and more lies about how unfortunate it is that we have to keep breaking the UN Charter and Geneva Conventions again and again. But it must be done because of 'terrorism', although he offers no evidence of who is responsible for the conflict. He's certainly the most postmodern foreign secretary we've ever had. And the most smarmy.

IMO these people, such as bro. Ed Milliband, are there precisely to DISCREDIT the entire political process and their lies are like little time bombs tripping off their tongues. Civil War has become a very real possibility with the types such as these having slimed their way into power.

In defence of the Pope who has of course worryingly also called for a 'New World Order', there must be something good going on there in the Vatican. Some people there who haven't realised it is a major institution of the devil. Because Kissinger and Blair have arrived recently. Top satanic fixers rapping on the vatican door like two bad pennies.

[zennon]

Asking them to convert to Christianity will make them all the more likely to become even more extreme.

[Linda]

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=061001233844.0n6u9xt6&show_art icle=1

British documentary alleges pope linked to "child abuse cover-up"

[Newspeak International]

[xmasdale]

http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=vie w&id=579&Itemid=1


Pope Benedict Go Home

by Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report, 9 April 2008


His beneficence he ain't. Pope Benedict XVI, a former Hitler Youth whose persona fits better with his given name, Joseph Ratzinger, transports his malevolent, rightwing presence to the United States next which, where he will doubtless do mischief with his political allies in the Bush regime. Benedict/Ratzinger soon proved himself one of the most obnoxious and historically ignorant top Catholics in modern times. The former Inquisitor told survivors of the world's worst holocaust Native Americans "secretly longed" to be brought under Christian rule - which wound up killing 19 out of every 20 of them. Muslims, said Benedict, were the source of all things "evil and inhuman." Under such circumstances, infallibility is terrifying.


"Benedict has proven himself to be among the worst, most retrograde popes in modern times."


Why would American media, politicians and average citizens welcome a Hitler Youth member who personally worked to insure Bush's re-election and who openly praised the genocide conducted against American Indians? If the man in question becomes pope, it obviously doesn't matter what he says or does. Otherwise sensible people suddenly act like illiterate medieval peasants and fight to kiss his ring.

Benedict XVI will make his first visit to America as pope next week. Since his elevation in 2005, Benedict has proven himself to be among the worst, most retrograde popes in modern times. Worse even than his predecessor, John Paul II. John Paul's iconic "pope mobile" and international visits gave him the appearance of a warm and cuddly spiritual leader. Yet he was every inch a politician, and a right wing one at that.

John Paul personally and forcefully opposed the liberation theology movement that swept Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI, was just like his boss. As head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which used to be called the Inquisition, Ratzinger crushed all efforts to question church authority or promote leftist political activity. Known as "God's Rottweiler," Ratzinger forced Fr. Leonardo Boff, the father of liberation theology, to retire to a monastery and shut up about liberating oppressed people.


"Ratzinger crushed all efforts to question church authority or promote leftist political activity."


Ratzinger didn't confine his politics to Latin America. In 2004 George W. Bush asked the Vatican for help in his election campaign. "Not all of the American bishops are with me," he whined. Bush's wish was Ratzinger's command. Ratzinger wrote a letter to American bishops and instructed them to deny communion to politicians who supported abortion rights. This letter was written in 2004, when John Kerry, a pro-choice Catholic, ran against George W. Bush. The communion controversy was just one of the ways in which the Kerry campaign was weakened by the Bush administration's successful mobilization of conservative white Christians.

It is certain that no pundit or politician will bring up this disgraceful activity when Pope Benedict visits Washington and New York. If a foreign religious leader can work to keep a favored American president in power and never be reproached, then he is free to deliver words of hate.

Since he became pope, Benedict has heaped insults on American Indians, and on Muslims all over the world. He said that Christianity was not imposed on Indians because they "secretly longed" for it. Rubbing salt into the gaping wound, Benedict added that worship of traditional Indian religions would be "a step backward."


"Benedict has heaped insults on American Indians and on Muslims all over the world."


Not content to insult the Indians who survived the holocaust inflicted upon them by Europeans, Benedict proved himself to be just as bigoted towards Muslims. He quoted a 14th century Byzantine emperor who said that the prophet Muhammad brought only "evil and inhuman" things to the world. Despite his blatant bigotry, Benedict is still treated with respect and admiration. It certainly is good to be the pope.

While European nations were killing Indians, they also began the enslavement of millions of Africans. The church put the full force of its authority behind slavery from the earliest days of European incursions around the world. In 1455, Pope Nicholas V gave permission to ". . . invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever . . . and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery..." The church didn't stray from that point of view for centuries. As late as 1866 the church said, "It is not contrary to the natural and divine law for a slave to be sold, bought, exchanged or given."

When Benedict visits Washington, D.C. and New York City he will say mass before huge crowds, and politicians will sharpen elbows and call in favors in order to be seen with him. No one has asked him to apologize for the church's past support of these genocides or for his own hate speech. Unlike Jeremiah Wright, who spoke truthful words, Benedict will be lionized for telling lies, and justifying centuries of atrocities because the perpetrators look like him.


"Unlike Jeremiah Wright, who spoke truthful words, Benedict will be lionized for telling lies."


Catholics are not the only Christian denomination who justified genocide and enslavement. America's true national religion, manifest destiny and white privilege, has very old and very deep roots. They start with the premise that Europeans had the right to claim foreign lands as their own, and kill, buy and sell human beings. Most Americans, regardless of denomination or religious affiliation, see nothing wrong with Pope Benedict's racism. That is why he will be welcomed with open arms. The German born ruler of the Vatican may be very American after all.



* Margaret Kimberley's Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgandaReport.Com. Ms. Kimberley maintains an edifying and frequently updated blog at freedomrider.blogspot.com. More of her work is also available at her Black Agenda Report archive page.

[acrobat74]

Quite an oxymoron, what does the pope have to do with "a God of understanding"?

[SHERITON HOTEL]

This is a great opportunity to marshall the troops and put on a show of force at ground zero while the Pontiff is there beseeching the white bearded male corcasian in the sky, get organised Stateside truthers! Have you noticed how our "free" media now censor the September 11 memorial every year?

[xmasdale]

http://www.counterpunch.org/jones05182007.html





Ask Pope Benedict: When Does Genocide Purify?



by Adam Jones, Counterpunch, 18 May 2007





Pope Benedict XVI's recent trip to Brazil seems to have done little to shore up the Catholic Church's declining power in its Latin American heartland. It went a long way, however, towards confirming Benedict's reputation as a reactionary bigot.
Benedict, of course, is the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Throughout the 1980s, he was Pope John Paul II's enforcer in the campaign to expunge the dangerously progressive ideals of Catholic "liberation theology" from Latin American soil. What could not be accomplished by state terrorists, who killed thousands of members of Christian "base communities" [1] in the 1970s and '80s, Ratzinger and John Paul sought to engineer by installing conservative bishops who would stem the progressive tide. Fortunately, they seem to have failed. An account by Larry Rohter in the New York Times (May 7) notes that the movement which Ratzinger "once called 'a fundamental threat to the faith of the church' ... persists as an active, even defiant force in Latin America," with some 80,000 base communities operating in Brazil alone. It is fuelled, as it always has been, by the "social and economic ills" that pervade the region, and that have only "worsened" under the neoliberal prescriptions of the past two decades.

This time around, Ratzinger/Benedict's bile was directed not at liberation theology, but squarely at the historical memory of the serial genocides -- probably the most destructive in human history -- inflicted upon the indigenous peoples of the Americas. On the last day of his visit, in the city of Aparecida, the Pope "touch[ed] on a sensitive historical episode," in the blandly understated language of an Associated Press dispatch (May 13). In other words, he ripped the bandages off a still-suppurating wound. According to the official text [2] of Benedict's comments on the Vatican website, the Pope declared that "the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean" were "silently longing" to receive Christ as their savior. He was "the unknown God whom their ancestors were seeking, without realizing it ..." Colonization by Spain and Portugal was not a conquest, but rather an "adoption" of the Indians through baptism, making their cultures "fruitful" and "purifying" them. Accordingly, "the proclamation of Jesus and of his Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbian cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture."

So there we have it. The invasion and conquest of the Americas, which caused the deaths of upwards of 90 percent of the indigenous population, was something the Indians had been pining for all along. They weren't just "asking for it," as sexist cranks depict women as complicit in their own rapes. They were actually "longing" for it, since salvation and "purification" came with it.

Actually, genocide came with it, as Raphael Lemkin knew. Lemkin is the Polish-Jewish jurist who, having fled the Nazi invasion of Poland for refuge in the U.S., coined the word "genocide" [3] in 1943. He defined genocide as "a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups." His framing became the foundation of the United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948, and of the academic field of comparative genocide studies. Lemkin himself was keenly aware of the devastation of the indigenous people of the Americas, and considered it basic to his understanding of genocide, though most of his writings on the theme remain unpublished. (See the text of John Docker's excellent February 2004 talk at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "Raphael Lemkin's History of Genocide and Colonialism". [4])

Benedict's astounding comments attracted barely a flicker of media attention in the West -- almost all of it on the wire services, and some of it problematic in itself. A May 13 Reuters dispatch noted blithely that, contrary to Benedict's claims, "many Indian groups believe the conquest brought them enslavement and genocide." This is rather like writing that "many Jewish groups believe that the Nazi Holocaust brought Jews enslavement and genocide." The reality exists independently of the belief. As blogger Stentor Danielson points out [5]: "In the real world, it's a basic historical fact that the Indians were enslaved. It's a basic historical fact that entire tribes were wiped out. The reason [that] 'many Indian groups believe' these historical facts is because people like Reuters' craven reporters won't admit when there's a fact behind the claims."

Indian organizations and spokespeople expressed outrage at Benedict's statements, calling them "arrogant and disrespectful." Sandro Tuxa, leader of a coalition of Indian tribes in Brazil's impoverished northeast, declared: "We repudiate the Pope's comments. To say the cultural decimation of our people represents a purification is offensive, and frankly, frightening" (Reuters, May 14).

Frightening indeed. Genocide scholar Greg Stanton describes denial as the final stage of genocide: "The perpetrators of genocide dig up the mass graves, burn the bodies, try to cover up the evidence and intimidate the witnesses" (see Stanton's "Eight Stages of Genocide" [6] on the Genocide Watch website). Genocidal perpetrators, and those who inherit their mantle, also seek to "purify" historical memory -- as Turkish authorities unceasingly, but so far unsuccessfully, have sought to do in the case of the Armenian genocide.

Stanton also reminds us that denial is "among the surest indicators [that] further genocidal massacres" may lie ahead. That's a thought worth pondering, as the reinvigorated indigenous movement in Latin America confronts a renewed neo-colonial assault on its culture, health, and means of subsistence.



* Adam Jones, Ph.D., is the author of Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction [7] (Routledge, 2006) and editor of Genocide, War Crimes and the West: History and Complicity (Zed Books, 2004). Email: adamj_jones@hotmail.com



----------------------





Notes:





[1] http://www.answers.com/topic/base-community



[2] http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2007/may/docum ents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20070513_conference-aparecida_en.html



[3] http://www.preventgenocide.org/lemkin/AxisRule1944-1.htm



[4] http://www.ushmm.org/conscience/analysis/details.php?content=2004-02-2 6



[5] http://debitage.net//blog/



[6] http://www.genocidewatch.org/8stages.htm



[7] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0415353858/counterpunchmaga

[Reflecter]

[fish5133]

[Dallas]