By Theodore Shoebat
Pope Francis recently said that countries must ensure care and dignity of migrants, as we read in a recent report from the Catholic Herald:
As up to 150 migrants are feared to have drowned in a shipwreck off the coast of Libya, Pope Francis made an appeal to the international community Sunday to act decisively to ensure the safety and dignity of migrants.
“I learned with pain the news of the dramatic shipwreck that occurred in recent days in the waters of the Mediterranean,” Pope Francis said July 28.
“I renew my heartfelt appeal for the international community to act promptly and decisively, to avoid the repetition of similar tragedies and to guarantee the safety and dignity of all. I invite you to pray with me for the victims and their families,” the pope said during his Angelus address.
According to the United Nations, the capsized migrant ship July 25 has resulted in the worst loss of life in the Mediterranean this year. Prior to this shipwreck, 669 people died in the Mediterranean Sea so far in 2019.
Pope Francis’ appeal echoes the call from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi, who said July 26, “The worst Mediterranean tragedy of the year has just occurred. Restoring rescue at sea, an end to refugee and migrant detention in Libya, increasing safe pathways out of Libya must happen now before it is too late for many more desperate people.”
At least 147 people were rescued from the vessel that sank five miles off the coast of Libya after suspected engine failure. The ship held somewhere between 250-300 migrants, including women and children, from Eritrea, Sudan, Bangladesh, Palestine, and other countries.
Pope Francis said that in praying for the victims one can ask God from the heart, “Father, why?”
He said that Jesus teaches us through the Our Father prayer that we can enter into prayerful and direct dialogue with God as a child talks to their father.
“Here is the novelty of Christian prayer. It is dialogue between people who love each other, a dialogue based on trust, supported by listening and open to solidarity. It is a dialogue of the Son with the Father, a dialogue between children and the Father,” Pope Francis said.
Pope Francis’ sympathy for migrants is the reason why bad faith actors like Steve Bannon have been pushing Western politicians to attack the Pope. Steve Bannon told Italy’s Interior Minister, Matteo Salvini, to publicly attack Pope Francis. In 2016 (in what leaked just recently) he even told Salvini that the Pope is “the enemy” As we read in a report from the Guardian:
Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon advised Italy’s interior minister Matteo Salvini to attack the pope over the issue of migration, according to sources close to the Italian far right.
During a meeting in Washington in April 2016, Bannon – who would within a few months take up his role as head of Trump’s presidential campaign – suggested the leader of Italy’s anti-immigration League party should start openly targeting Pope Francis, who has made the plight of refugees a cornerstone of his papacy.
“Bannon advised Salvini himself that the actual pope is a sort of enemy. He suggested for sure to attack, frontally,” said a senior League insider with knowledge of the meeting in an interview with the website SourceMaterial.
After the meeting, Salvini became more outspoken against the pope, claiming that conservatives in the Vatican were on his side. One tweet from Salvini’s account, in May 2016, said: “The pope says migrants are not a danger. Whatever!” On 6 May 2016, Salvini, after the pope’s plea for compassion towards migrants, stated: “Uncontrolled immigration, an organised and financed invasion, brings chaos and problems, not peace.”
Bannon is stirring up the pot in Europe, acting like a Martin Luther who worked to get the German nobility against the Pope in his own time. Bannon’s strategy is part of his current enterprise of recruiting people in Europe in order to cause a wave of nationalism in the continent. Bannon is conducting this plan in collaboration with Banjamin Harnwell, through their organization, the Institute for Human Dignity.
Bannon is also working with major nationalist activists and politicians in Europe. He has been active in boosting the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban who we know has been in support for the creation of a EU military force (which, if created, will be led by Germany and will only be a revival of German militarism). While many believe that Orban is a force against Islamic power by his anti-immigration rhetoric, the Hungarian government has been working with the most powerful of the Muslim countries, Turkey, to revamp and advance the Hungarian military. Bannon also favors the neo-Nazi politician, Filip DeWinter, the organizer of the very questionable 2007 Counter-jihad Summit in Brussels and a separatist who wants to split Flanders from the rest of Belgium.
Bannon also collaborates with some very nefarious political activists and agents. For example, he praises both Tommy Robinson — the British Counter-jihad provocateur and rallying causer — and Boris Johnson, one of the biggest lobbyists for Brexit and supporter for neo-Ottomanism, as we read in a recent report from the Guardian:
Donald Trump’s outspoken former adviser Steve Bannon has praised Boris Johnson and Tommy Robinson in the same interview, describing the Tory MP as being potentially “a great prime minister” and the far-right activist as a “force of nature”. The US rightwing populist said he admired Johnson and that the former foreign secretary had “nothing to apologise for” after his controversial descriptions of fully veiled Muslim women in a newspaper column.
He said Johnson should continue to make similar points. He told the Sunday Times (paywall): “Boris just needs to be Boris – true to his nature and his calling – and I think he has potential to be a great prime minister, not a good one.”
Bannon has been in contact with Johnson since he resigned from government last month, although he added: “Any conversations I have with active political figures are confidential – I consider Boris Johnson someone who understands the physics in the ebb and flow of events. Those individuals are rare.”
Boris Johnson wants to bring his idea of a revived Roman Empire into fruition, and he wants Turkey to be a part of this envisage, which means he is praising and supporting the very country that genocided millions of Christians in the first half of the 20th century. Why would Bannon — who is suppose to be Catholic and ‘anti-globalist’ — be collaborating with someone like this?
This Bannon is not who you think.
He is not this person you have in your heads, who cares for ‘the people’ and just simply wants to fight the evil “globalists” and ‘stop Communism.’ Bannon is a sinister conspirator, and this is easily demonstrated by the people he supports and works alongside with.
The mentality of Bannon is that most ruinous way of thinking that screams for the utter destruction of whatever it doesn’t like. Bannon wants to tear down the current way of governance in Europe and have it replaced with a system of his own doing. The American professor Ronald Radosh recalls a private conversation in which Bannon told him that he was in fact a Leninist and wants to destroy the state:
I met Steve Bannon—the executive director of Breitbart.com who’s now become the chief executive of the Trump campaign, replacing the newly resigned Paul Manafort—at a book party held in his Capitol Hill townhouse on Nov. 12, 2013. We were standing next to a picture of his daughter, a West Point graduate, who at the time was a lieutenant in the 101 Airborne Division serving in Iraq. The picture was notable because she was sitting on what was once Saddam Hussein’s gold throne with a machine gun on her lap. “I’m very proud of her,” Bannon said.
Then we had a long talk about his approach to politics. He never called himself a “populist” or an “American nationalist,” as so many think of him today. “I’m a Leninist,” Bannon proudly proclaimed.
Shocked, I asked him what he meant.
“Lenin,” he answered, “wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” Bannon was employing Lenin’s strategy for Tea Party populist goals. He included in that group the Republican and Democratic Parties, as well as the traditional conservative press.
So there you have it. All of these Americans who think Bannon is some hero are in fact getting played by someone who takes inspiration from Vladimir Lenin. He in fact is supporting another Lenin, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known as “Tommy Robinson.” Since his real last name is Lenon, lets call him that instead of his pseudonym. Lenon, like Bannon, is a provocateur who enjoys stirring up the pot for attention and causing mayhem. Lenon collaborates with some pretty nefarious people, like Martin Sellner the leader of the pagan, pro-homosexual and racialist Austrian Identitarians. He has ties with the German nationalists, such as the eugenist AfD party and Compact Magazine which is ran by Jurgen Elsasser, an activist and ideologue of the Identitarians. The AfD party has a eugenic ideology within itself. For example, its former leader Frauke Petry (who resigned as the party’s candidate for chancellor because she was too “moderate”) spoke about a future “darwinist’ war in Germany between Whites and ‘Afro-Arabians’, as we read in a report from the Local:
Petry gave a speech in Stuttgart on Monday for German Unity Day in which she predicted a “Darwinistic” conflict between Europe’s residing “transfer payment recipients” and immigrants from the “lumpenproletariat Afro-Arabian world,” the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) reported.
People who look to Darwinist dystopian envisages are just like those who say that immigration is leading to “overpopulation” and the draining of our resources. There are numerous organizations teaching this type of idea, such as the influential Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), Center for Immigration Studies, NumbersUSA, etc.
But what most of the enthusiast masses miss is that these organizations were founded by John Tanton, an environmentalist and population control enthusiast who believes that abortion is a good thing for population reduction. Tanton has also worked for Planned Parenthood, setting up a Planned Parenthood clinic in northern Michigan. Tanton’s network is a receiver of the Scaife donor empire which finances Malthusian causes, especially ones that are immigration focused.
Another thing that one can notice about these types of movements is the prevalent collaboration with homosexuals . For example, Dennis Prager, one of the biggest voices in the American conservative movement, admires the supposed racial homogeneity of Japan. Dennis Prager wrote an article describing Japan as a homogeneous society that has low crime rates because of its racial homogeneity, and he writes also that there is a direct correlation between crime and ethnic homogeneity:
“I am writing this column in Japan, a country whose crime rate is the lowest among countries with large populations. I asked my Japanese translator, a middle-aged woman, what she thought.
‘Why is there is so little crime in Japan?’ I asked.
Without taking a moment to reflect, she responded, ‘Because we don’t allow immigration.’
Anyone who visits Japan is struck by the ethnic homogeneity of the nation. If you meet a Caucasian, a black or a Hispanic in Japan, you can be all but certain that the person is visiting or studying there, not a citizen.
Likewise in the United States, there is direct correlation between ethnic homogeneity and low levels of violence.”
Prager is not ignorant of the racist and violent history of Japan, in its genocides of the Chinese, the Koreans, the Filipinos and other Asians, and also of its post-war policy of forced sterilization. Prager is using the ahistorical mentalities of Americans to lead them into an admiration for Japan’s supposed homogeneity (something that all current day racists do to substantiate their beliefs).
Dennis Prager will also back Sodom and speak very lightly about pedophilia, as is demonstrable in his conversation with the sodomite Dave Rubin:
Prager: “I am as comfortable with these two couples as with heterosexual couples
Rubin: And by the way, for the record, right before we started you asked me if I was married. You didn’t know if I was straight or gay and I didn’t sense that you cared—
Prayer: And my immediate concern was how did you meet. I wanna hear your romance. I’m as interested as if it was a woman.
…
Prager: “Well I assume you’d rather be on a political channel than a gay channel.”
Rubin: “Yeah!”
Prager: You’re not defined by your gayness.
Rubin: “This is as gay as it gets.
Prager: “Yes.”
…
Prager: “Normal is not defined by your sexual orientation … By the way I actually believe bisexual is the norm.
Prager: “The Bible said: ‘Men, you are as happy with boys — I don’t mean 8 year olds, 15 year olds — just as a grown man is happy with a 15 year old girl. In that sense, homosexuals and heterosexuals are identical.”
And what does Prager say about those people (like us) who oppose Sodom? Here are his words:
“Look, there are people on the Right — I hate to say this, and this bothers me — there are people on the Right who have contempt for gays. And its wrong, its biblically wrong, its humanly wrong, and it does bother me.”
The alliance between the people who are against lenient immigration policy and Sodom can also be seen in the fact that Steve Bannon worked with Milo Yiannopolous who pushes for the toleration of pederasty, for his former website, Breitbart.com.
Ultimately what this is about is getting people desensitized to the sins that cry out to heaven, the evils of Sodom and the ignoring of the cries of the foreigner. As the Catholic Catechism says: “The catechetical tradition also recalls that there are sins that cry to heaven: the blood of Abel, the sin of the Sodomites, the cry of the people oppressed in Egypt, the cry of the foreigner, the widow, and the orphan, injustice to the wage earner.” (1867) Here in this line that stems from the mind of eternal truth, from the Mind of God, we can see that by “the people oppressed in Egypt” it is referring to “the cry of the foreigner”, or the abuse of the immigrant. Here in America we have the case of the policy of separating migrant families, which the top White House advisor, Stephen Miller, enjoys to look at, as we learn from one anonymous White House advisor:
“Stephen actually enjoys seeing those pictures at the border … He’s a twisted guy, the way he was raised and picked on. There’s always been a way he’s gone about this. He’s Waffen-SS.”
To scoff or be indifferent to the sufferings of immigrants is one of the sins that cry to heaven. And right next to this evil is the sinister way of Sodom. So within the party of immigration hysteria, there is an ignoring of the cry of the foreigner and a love for Sodom. This same body of activists and conspirators also have a mentality of destruction. If they don’t like something, there solution is always to the extreme. Trump called the situation at the border a “national emergency” even though there was no national emergency. This was an extreme position. Tyranny is built on the backs of political exaggeration. Christ was murdered by a political body who used political exaggerations to get Pilate to murder Christ, wailing about how Christ was an enemy of the Caesar:
From then on Pilate sought to release Him, but the Jews cried out, saying, “If you let this Man go, you are not Caesar’s friend. Whoever makes himself a king speaks against Caesar.” (John 19:12)
Christ was murdered under political exaggeration, and every genocide that has ever been committed was done under political exaggeration. The Young Turks who orchestrated the Armenian Genocide would have told you about Armenian terrorists who murdered innocent Muslim villagers, and they would be pointing to something that indeed happened. The same Young Turks would have told you about Armenian soldiers deserting the Ottoman army and going to the Russian side. And this too did indeed occur.
But they used this as propaganda fodder to justify the genocide of millions of people. Christ declared Himself as King, but the Jews took this and made it out as though He was trying to do a revolution against the Caesar. Christ was made out to be a terrorist, and an unjust edict was imposed upon Him. Lies were made up about Iraq, and the whole country was devastated and over a million people were killed thanks to an unjust military invasion. They wanted to make it as though Iraq was behind 9/11. They knew this was a baseless accusation but did not care.
As a letter by Neoconservatives said: “even if the evidence does not link Iraq directly to the [9/11] attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power to Iraq.” They did not care about the truth, but were rather using the emotions of anger caused by 9/11 to stoke up the American people and get them to support destructive war which led to the horrors of ISIS. This letter was signed not by some fringe pro-war activists, but by major Neoconservative figures like William Bennett, Aaron Friedberg, Donald Kagan, Richard Perle, Leon Wieseltier, Stephan Solarz, Charles Krauthammer, Eliot Cohen, Jean Kirkpatrick, William Kristol, Robert Kagan and Norman Podhortez (See Mearshiemer, The Israel Lobby, ch. 8, p. 248, also see note 111).
A LESSON FROM THE BIBLE:
What Most Miss About Israel
The story of using political exaggerations to justify destructive action is of the mind of those people who destroyed the Hivites. Yes it is true that the prince, Shechem, had sex with Dinah, but it is also true that the king of the Hivites agreed to have all of his people worship the God of Israel as recompense for the sin of his son. The king said to the Hebrews:
“And make marriages with us; give your daughters to us, and take our daughters to yourselves. So you shall dwell with us, and the land shall be before you. Dwell and trade in it, and acquire possessions for yourselves in it.” (Genesis 34:9-10)
The sons of Jacob told the Hivite king and Shechem his son that the people had to be circumcised in order for the agreement to be made. Shechem told his people:
“These men are at peace with us. Therefore let them dwell in the land and trade in it. For indeed the land is large enough for them. Let us take their daughters to us as wives, and let us give them our daughters. Only on this condition will the men consent to dwell with us, to be one people: if every male among us is circumcised as they are circumcised.” (Genesis 34:21-22)
This would have united Jew and Gentile. Here were the people of Shechem, about to convert to worship the God of Israel, here the Hebrews and gentiles were about to converge, to say as Boaz did: Your nation is my nation, and your God, my God. (Ruth 1:16) But Simeon and Levi, instead of honoring the agreement, slaughtered the Hivites after the men were circumcised and in pain from the operations:
Now it came to pass on the third day, when they were in pain, that two of the sons of Jacob, Simeon and Levi, Dinah’s brothers, each took his sword and came boldly upon the city and killed all the males. And they killed Hamor and Shechem his son with the edge of the sword, and took Dinah from Shechem’s house, and went out. (Genesis 34:25-26)
The massacre of the people of Shechem’s kingdom exemplifies the imbalance of the mind that seeks destruction when it is not called for, even at the expense of human unity. In the words of Richard of St. Victor, who wrote much on the story of Dinah and Shechem:
“But it ought to be considered again that often in that which they do bravely, they go beyond the bounds of proper balance. This we can easily prove from this deed of theirs that we have in our hands. For when they had drawn their swords they violently killed persons joined to them in a pact of alliance, and on account of the violated chastity of one they brought about the sudden massacre of so many men.” (Twelve Patriarchs, ch. lvii)
Notice, that it was Simeon and Levi who massacred the Hivites. The patriarch of the Levites, who were the people of the Levitical priesthood, massacred the Hivites. The Hivites were the same people with whom Joshua made a covenant during the Hebrew invasion of Canaan. “There was not a city that made peace with the children of Israel, except the Hivites, the inhabitants of Gibeon. All the others they took in battle.” (Genesis 34:25-26) The Hivites were slaughtered by Simeon and Levi, even though they wished peace and unity with them. And it was these same Hivites, who lived in Gibeon, who centuries later would make a covenant of peace with the Hebrews. In fact, the greatest battle that Joshua ever led was one in which he protected the Hivites from the other Canaanites kingdoms, when you had that beautiful moment in which Joshua gazed up to Heaven and said:
“Sun, stand still over Gibeon;
And Moon, in the Valley of Aijalon.”
So the sun stood still,
And the moon stopped,
Till the people had revenge
Upon their enemies.”
The sun of God’s light shined upon the Hivites, and so did His mercy illuminate upon them. King Saul, possessed by that spirit of tribalism that had taken Simeon and Levi, sought to kill the Hivites in his zeal for the children of Israel and Judah (2 Samuel 21:2). God was so enraged with Saul that he struck Israel with famine. When David asked God why there was famine, He told the king: “It is because of Saul and his bloodthirsty house, because he killed the Gibeonites.” (2 Samuel 21:1) God never wanted ethno-nationalism or tribalism, and showing mercy on the Hivites He manifested His universal mercies, showing that His love was not just for the Hebrews, but for all people. David then went to the Hivites of Gibeon and asked: “What shall I do for you? And with what shall I make atonement, that you may bless the inheritance of the Lord?” The Gibeonites replied:
“We will have no silver or gold from Saul or from his house, nor shall you kill any man in Israel for us.”
The Hivites, unlike Simeon and Levi, did not wish to slaughter people who had nothing to do with the crime committed. While Simeon and Levi slaughtered indiscriminately, the Hivites simply wanted justice to be made and sought the punishing solely on the house of Saul.
The demand of the Hivites exhibited balance, Simeon and Levi demonstrated imbalance.
David told the Hivites: “Whatever you say, I will do for you.” (2 Samuel 21:3-4) As David asked this, so did Shechem tell Jacob and his sons: whatever you say to me I will give (Genesis 34:11) The stories are paralleled. It is as though this moment of David is staring at the reflection of Shechem on a mirror. As Shechem was willing to do whatever the Hebrews asked before being butchered in an act of deceit, now David the Hebrew is expressing his will to the Hivites to do whatever they request as recompense to a massacre imposed on them by an unjust tyrant.
Levi slaughtered the Hivite Canaanites, and it was from Levi’s line that Aaron’s priesthood descended. But Christ’s priesthood did not come from Levi, but rather it was of the priesthood of a Canaanite king, Melchizedek who Josephus calls a Canaanite chief. To refer to the Apostle Paul: Jesus, having become High Priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek. (Hebrews 6:20) Through the order of a Canaanite, humanity is redeemed. Through the order of one who the prophet Noah called a servant of servants (Genesis 9:22), Christ was a servant to the world and was murdered by the Levites, just as the Hivites were slaughtered under the cruel hands of Levi in unjust deception. As Canaan was cursed, so Christ, having become a curse for us (for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree’), that the blessing of Abraham might come upon the Gentiles in Christ Jesus, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith. (Galatians 3:13-14)
Christ did not save the world being a priest of the Levitical order, but of a Canaanite order, showing the world — not tribalism nor racialism — but the universality of redemption.