Is the Pope a Catholic, or Just Another NATO Stooge?

December 17, 2022

Source

Declan Heyes

Just as Ghana cannot afford an economic Maguire, so also can the Catholic Church not afford a spiritual Maguire at its center, Declan Hayes writes.

Although Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova now claims that Russia accepts the Pope’s apology over his Chechen and Buryat smears and therefore considers the matter closed, it is anything but. Nor, contrary to her conciliatory statement, can there be constructive, useful or meaningful dialogue between Russia and the Vatican, until the Holy See stops being NATO’s moronic cat’s paw.

Zakharova’s outrage and that of her colleagues arose, recall, because of the truly idiotic, uninformed and downright racist comments Pope Francis made about Chechen, Buryat and other Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine. Although I covered this outrage here at the time, some questions I raised remain unanswered, the chief one being who supplied Pope Francis with his mis-information on the Buryats and Chechens and how does their mis-information disavow my simpler explanation?

That, of course, is like the famous question of asking if the Pope is a Catholic. It is a rhetorical question as I already supplied the answer. As the Vatican has no direct inroads into the Russian High Command, it has no way of knowing what the Chechens and Buryats do or do not do. The Vatican relying on NATO outlets like Gillian Tett for their news is akin to putting the Pope’s neck in a noose; it is idiotic beyond measure.

It is worse than suicidal as it has the Pope, Christ’s Vicar on Earth, failing all three of the sieves of Socrates (the Greek philosopher, not the late and great Brazilian footballer). That is, NATO’s mis-information was palpably untrue, it was malicious and it served no other purpose than to stoke further fuel on the inferno that is Ukraine and, collaterally, to damage the good name of the Pope and of the Catholic Church not only in Russia, but also in Serbia, China and much further afield as well. Not only has it further unnecessarily damaged relations between Russia, Serbia and allied countries, on the one hand, and the Roman Catholic and allied churches on the other but it will create further formidable obstacles to building peace with justice going forward.

This, unfortunately, is not the Pope’s first rodeo. I wrote here on how the Pope held aloft a Ukrainian Nazi flag, as if it was the Host, the body and blood of Jesus, the Pope holds aloft when saying Mass. I wrote here of how NATO have been using the Catholic Church and its Ukrainian sister church in particular as a Trojan horse to destroy Russia since at least the time of Pope John Paul 11. And I wrote here on how Pope Francis, together with the Anglican cult, MI5 at prayer, is helping to undermine not only the Russian Orthodox Church but Christianity itself, most particularly in the Levant whose Christians, God’s own people, are suffering the most terrible hardships along with their Muslim neighbors, hardships I know as a fact the Pope has been repeatedly briefed on, but which he ignores in favor of Zelensky’s rotten, rump Reich.

Pope Francis, fresh from his Buryat blunder, is now urging us to have a lean Christmas and to send the money we save to Ukraine, by which he probably primarily means the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church that is in full communion with the Vatican, that Pope John Paul 11 made a special point of highlighting when he assumed the Papacy, and that is at the center of much of the Nazi allegations levelled at Zelensky’s rump Reich. Although there are undoubtedly many Ukrainians who could do with help, and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church is to be commended for any good it does, Pope Francis should not have fallen into this further NATO trap.

Yes, there are people of all denominations and none on both sides of the lines in Ukraine who desperately need our help. But equally so, there are untold numbers of innocents in Yemen, in the Levant and further afield who also desperately need our help and Pope Francis is squeezing all of them out of the picture. I have friends, who support minor and largely unsung efforts in the Philippines, in Zambia, in Mexico and in Peru. Supporters of Glasgow Celtic Football Club send money to the poor of Eastern Thailand, thanks to a lovely scheme one of their supporters got going there. Check out Africa’s wonderful Masaka dancers who dance divinely for dimes; is the Pope seriously arguing that these are children of a lesser God? Should all those Peter’s Pence go to funding Olga Zelenska’s wardrobe instead? What utter madness is he talking?

For my own part, I work money to Syrian based Salesian nun Sr Bridget Doody, whom I interview here. Because of sanctions on Syria, I have to go through circuitous routes not only through this site and my own site as well (which I also use to avoid NATO’s censorship of this site).

Sr Doody works at the Italian Hospital in Damascus, which is under the direct auspices of His Holiness,.Pope Francis. Isn’t it odd that I get money from Lutherans, Communists and Muslims for a hospital under the auspices of the Holy Father, while he asks us to scrimp and save for Clown Prince Zelensky and his over dressed wife? What utter madness is this?

Although I enjoy my occasional cups of tea in the Salesian convent in Damascus, whose nuns cannot be praised highly enough, those nuns have criticized me for paying, out of my own pocket, for heart operations to keep little Syrian girls alive as that money, had it been spent on very basic provisions for other children, would have kept many more children alive.

These are the Sophie’s Choices these good nuns, these godly nuns, make day after day, which children to save and which to allow die. I have seen other nuns make the same choices in their orphanage in Smokey Mountain, Manila, as they wrapped their charges not in swaddling clothes like baby Jesus, but, with their nickels and dimes, in discarded newspapers to try to keep their little bodies warm and, therefore, alive. If Our God Lives, He lives in the hearts and souls of those nuns and those they save. And that is a cold and uncomfortable fact.

And, if God is to live in you, you should give whatever spare money you have to the nuns of Syria, to the nuns of the Philippines, to Africa’s Masaka dancers or to the Thai Tims of eastern Thailand, where it will be put to much better use than whatever the Ukrainian Church would get after Ali Baba and Zelensky’s forty thieves take their considerable cuts.

Witness Trócaire, one of Ireland’s biggest Catholic charities. The money they collected from innocent Irish school children they use

d to fund women’s propaganda groups in the ISIS Caliphate of East Ghouta, from where Sr Doody’s convent and all of Damascus was systematically shelled for years on end, until Russia’s General Armageddon helped put an end to all that.

Trócaire is not the only Irish group funding NATO’s Syrian terrorists. GOAL, which became Ireland’s biggest and most corrupt NGO thanks to CIA funding under the directorship of Dublin MEP (and NATO shill) Barry Andrews, poured tens of millions of dollars into Syria’s Caliphates. Is Pope Francis saying we should preference GOAL’s Ukrainian scam over the work of the good nuns of Syria, the Philippines and Palestine, where I met the saintly French nuns of the Bethlehem orphanage (where baby Jesus was born) who, in a beautiful meeting of minds, collect euros from French school children they get to team up as pen pals with their orphaned charges?

White Pope, Black Pope

These godly nuns have, at least, the satisfaction that they do not have to contend with the ungodly morons Maria Zakharova has to swat away like the gnats the Buryats have to contend with in their Siberian summers. If the Catholic Church, with the Pope and the Jesuit order at its helm, is to be something more than a Siberian gnat, it has to radically lift its game so that these great nuns, who do God’s great work in all corners of the earth, can continue to be lights in NATO’s darkness. The Black Pope’s Jesuits, among whose members is the White Pope, Pope Francis, is like so much more of the Catholic Church, a male gerontocracy, who not only won’t move quickly enough with the times but who are being infiltrated and outflanked at all levels by the more nimble footed and infinitely more well funded proxies of MI5 and the CIA. To counter this and to get back on the right track, the Catholic Church must radically reform itself and put sure footed people like Maria Zhakarova in positions so that China’s President Xi might take it seriously. It must, in other words, be as diplomatically and organizationally professional and sure footed as are the Russian and Chinese governments. That is the first step.

White Flag, Black Flag

As a Jesuit, Pope Francis must be familiar with the spiritual exercises of Ignatius Loyola, the great Basque nationalist, who founded his order and who, with Francis Xavier, their great apostle, made the Jesuits the hallmark of pragmatic professionalism, which were consistent with Loyola’s military training.

In his exercises, Loyola refers to the two standards soldiers rally around in war, our flag, the flag of Christ and that other flag of our enemy, the anti-Christ. Although it is a simple analogy, it is a profound one. One either plays with Team Jesus, Team Good, or one does not.

As a football supporter, who has met Messi and the great Argentinian and Italian teams, Pope Francis has probably seen this video of the Parliament of Ghana laughing at England’s Harry Maguire. Just as Ghana cannot afford an economic Maguire, so also can the Catholic Church not afford a spiritual Maguire at its centrer. When, as is likely, Messi, Mbappe and their teammates once again visit the Vatican to present him with signed shirts and footballs, Pope Francis should raffle those items and give the proceeds to the nuns of Syria, Palestine or the Philippines, the Buryats, the Chechens, the Thai Tims or Africa’s Masaka dancers. Once he gets his selfies with Messi and Mbappe, the Pope should ask the French and Argentine managers for organizational pointers on how to clear out the rot from his own team so that Maria Zakharova and President Xi will regard him and his as solid players for Term Jesus and not as Spiritual Maguires for Team NATO.

What is Bergoglio up to?

March 17, 2022

Note by the Saker: to fully understand how evil and hypocritical all this business about “consecrating” Russia to something by the Latins, you need to be aware of two things: the Ukraine is the creation of the Papacy and its goal has always been the destruction of Russia and the so-called “Marian apparitions” are just one of the many hoaxes, falsifications, forgeries and outright satanic manifestations of the typical Latin spiritual delusions (prelest).  Finally, I remind everybody that the moderation guidelines (#20.4) specifically ban the advocacy of “Latin Christianity (Papism, including the propaganda of the so-called “Marian apparitions” including the Fatima hoax)“.  Any attempts to justify these so-called “consecrations” or any attempts to justify the Latin heresy will result in the comment sent to trash the its author banned.

***

by Stephen Karganovic for the Saker Blog

Orthodox believers will remain unfazed by this, and one may also assume that many followers of the disintegrating Roman Catholic church will be equally unimpressed, but nevertheless a recent Vatican announcement about “consecrating” Russia and Ukraine on March 25 (while some derision is allowed) should not be taken lightly.

To be precise, it may and should be taken lightly only in the religious sense, but it ought to be treated with all due seriousness and respect where it counts for the Vatican, politically. Coming in close coordination with the initiation of the brutal campaign to annihilate Russia politically, morally, and economically, Bergoglio’s move, while dressed up in religious garb, is a secular power play and geopolitics, pure and simple.

The consecration is inextricably bound up with an alleged appearance of the Virgin Mary to shepherds in Fatima, Portugal, in 1917, essentially replicated, following a similar pattern, many decades later, in Medjugorje, Bosnia. This is not the place to analyse the Fatima event in great detail. It suffices to say that it was extremely controversial from the start.

The thrust of the Fatima “vision” was that the subsequent fate of the world mystically depended on the “consecration of Russia” to the heart of Virgin Mary, because otherwise “Russia’s errors” would spread throughout the world. At the time that the request for Russia’s consecration was allegedly made from on high, the Bolshevik revolution was in its initial stages and the reference to “errors” which its victory might propagate globally made some sense, not just to Roman Catholics, but to people of other backgrounds as well.

The time frame and context in which the consecration request was originally made (1917) for the purpose of impeding the spread of “Russia’s errors” is extremely important for assessing the true nature and the probable motives behind Bergoglio’s current initiative to finally bring it about, and in this particular geopolitical situation.

The Bolshevik revolution succeeded in putting Russia under Communist and atheist control, and the simultaneous formation of the Communist International, precisely for the purpose of spreading the errors that concerned the Blessed Virgin, obviously should have created a clear and present threat that ought immediately to have triggered the requested consecration, assuming that the Vatican seriously believed in the authenticity of Fatima narrative.

Instead, the Vatican was engaged during most of the 1920s in pursuing an accommodation with the very Soviet regime that the heavenly mediatrix was warning against. It was offering it its implicit acquiescence in return for a free hand to annex the battered remnant of the persecuted Russian Orthodox Church and to freely propagate Roman Catholic dogma to the Russian masses.

The accommodation ultimately fell through, and the Vatican took up a militantly anti-communist and anti-Soviet position. Various Popes subsequently did make what appear to have been half-hearted and procedurally defective attempts to fulfil the Fatima consecration mandate, but in the end the consensus of most Roman Catholic authorities was that they were improperly executed (“botched,” deliberately or not) and therefore were invalid and without effect by Roman Catholic canonical standards.

In the wake of the “aggiornamento” and Vatican II, not pushing the consecration too insistently made political sense. While on one hand church conservatives had to be kept at bay with some noises indicating openness to carry out the Virgin’s mandate, practical political considerations (always foremost in Vatican’s calculations) favored building influence within the Eastern bloc in order to more easily undermine it in concert with the Western powers (the Reagan – John Paul pact). Those considerations dictated that grossly provocative gestures such as were allegedly demanded at Fatima be temporarily shelved.

And so they were, except for some harmless PR games that were played with reference to the content of the “third secret” and speculation over the possible substitution of Sister Lucia, one of the original Fatima children, by another cloistered nun more amendable to the current Vatican party line in the post-Conciliar period.

Fast forward to 2022. Outwardly, it should have come as a surprise that the until recently side-lined Fatima matter suddenly became so urgent and central in the mind of the holy father. Why the rush to fast-track a ritual that for slightly over one hundred years has lain on the Vatican’s back burner without any visible prejudice to Russia, the Ukraine, or the rest of the world?

It does not take a rocket scientist to answer that question. There is no religious urgency whatsoever. The overwhelming majority of Christians in Russia and the Ukraine are Eastern Orthodox and Vatican, Roman Catholic mumbo-jumbo is not even on their radar. It does not concern or affect them in the least. A legitimate side question, of course, is what gives the Pope and the Vatican the right to “consecrate” millions of souls who are not even affiliated with them? Would it not be polite to at least ask for their consent? It is probably late at this point to organize a consecration referendum in the lucky candidate countries because March 25 is too close, but the sheer arrogance of designating subjects for religious ritual without their consent is indeed stunning. And typical, one is tempted to add.

There is just one coherent explanation for Bergoglio’s rush to “consecrate.” It is the currently raging Ukrainian crisis and the Vatican’s determination to demonstrate urbi et orbi its political alignment with the West’s general assault on Russia. It is a signal of the Vatican’s determination that at last, over a century later, the moment is finally ripe to openly join the collective, political West in extirpating “Russia’s errors,” and if possible annihilating Russia itself.

A double irony is apparent in this charade which will soon be perpetrated by a largely spent, but still formidable, global political force masquerading as a religious institution.

First, in 1917 “Russia’s errors” may have been a genuine issue (in reality those were the false doctrines of Russia’s new rulers, rather than the beliefs of the Russian Orthodox people) and those doctrines were indeed execrable not just from the standpoint of traditional Roman Catholic teaching but of all decent people everywhere. But those are errors that contemporary Russia rejects completely, having adopted instead many of the values that at the time the Fatima Virgin allegedly spoke the Roman Catholic church technically stood for but which it has since opportunistically discarded. That fact alone gives the lie to Bergoglio’s theatrical pretensions.

The other blatant irony is that it is the collective West, with the Vatican as its spiritual centre, which owes the world an accounting for the innumerable errors that have become its dominant creed. If a ritual of consecration is necessary to disperse the errors which threaten the stability of the moral order, Bergoglio would do better to reformat the event he has scheduled for March 25. He should forget Russia and the Ukraine and, if he must, make the collective West, including the European Union and NATO, the object of his error busting consecration.

The show set by the Vatican for March 25 is not a religious exercise in any proper sense of that word. It will be stage managed by the man who during his relatively brief pontificate has hollowed out even the vestiges of his church’s traditional teaching that he found at the time of his investiture. Whether that man even believes in God is not an unreasonable question. He has far fewer divisions today than his predecessor had at the time Stalin impishly popped his famous question, but like a gambler who goes va banque he is betting all his dwindling assets on the unconditional victory of Russia’s enemies and symbolically demonstrating his allegiance to them.

He is hoping for a piece of the action in the ignominious world order that is being designed by the ungodly coalition of which his fallen institution has become an integral member. Unfortunately for him, he may have overplayed his hand and met his match. Smart money is betting that when rewards for service are set to be distributed, and the Roman pontiff has even fewer divisions than now under his command, he will be dumped unceremoniously as over the centuries he himself had dumped the Lord whose earthly vicar he insolently claimed to be.

Pope Francis Will Consecrate RUSSIA to the Immaculate Heart of Mary on March 25th

March 15, 2022

Please tell me this is all part of a bad joke!!!

Did Russia Have to Attack Ukraine?

March 5, 2022

By Darko Lazar

While announcing the start of military operations inside Ukraine on February 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that he “had no other way of proceeding”.

“What was happening left us with no choice,” Putin said, noting that a “high-risk” situation in Ukraine posed an existential threat to Russia. However, he never specified what that risk was.

Naturally, everyone concluded that Putin was talking about NATO’s eastward expansion over the last three decades. But what if there is more to it than that?

Pathogens and biological weapons

In October 2017, Putin was hosting a meeting at the Kremlin of the Russian Presidential Commission on Human Rights.

At one point, the discussion took an unexpected turn when Putin suddenly suggested that the West was working on a new bioweapon.

“Do you know that biological material is collected all over the country, from different ethnic groups and people living in different geographical locations of Russia?” Putin said. “But what for? They do it purposefully and professionally.”

The Russian president was referring to research being conducted by the US Air Force’s largest medical department (the 59th Medical Wing). Those allegations prompted a quick response from the Pentagon.

The spokesman for the Air Education and Training Command, Capt. Beau Downey, told Sputnik that the samples are being collected “to conduct musculoskeletal research aimed at identifying the different biomarkers associated with injury.”

Fast forward to October 2021, when the war of words between Beijing and Washington over the origins of the coronavirus was intensifying. Both sides were alleging that the pandemic was linked to each other’s research.

That same month, Beijing joined Moscow in calling on the United Nations to review the biological warfare strength of the US and its allies. China and Russia jointly demanded that Washington abides by a UN convention on biological weapons, accusing the Americans of operating more than 200 military biolabs outside the US. The Chinese and the Russians allege that these US military facilities pose a direct threat to their national security.

Nothing about this declaration suggests that it was meant for propaganda purposes. It wasn’t widely covered by the media or circulated by the Chinese and Russian governments.

Instead, it was quickly followed by Moscow’s demands for security guarantees from the West, including that Ukraine should never become a member of NATO. China offered its support to Russia, warning that Moscow had “reasonable security concerns,” which the Americans and their allies should take “seriously”.

Just a few days later, Russia’s neighbor to the south and one of its most important allies, Kazakhstan, suddenly descended into chaos. Hundreds were killed as shadowy armed cells began seizing critical state infrastructure.

While a large Russian force deployed to help restore order in that country, Russia’s official news agency TASS highlighted reports that a secret bio-laboratory there had been compromised. The lab, which sits just outside Kazakhstan’s Almaty, is funded by the Pentagon and used to store dangerous pathogens. According to unconfirmed reports, the lab was briefly seized by “unidentified people”.

Then came the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics, which was overshadowed by the most recent meeting between Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping. A few weeks later, Russian troops were given the order to move on Ukraine.

A chain of laboratories 

On February 25, an article published in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists cites the director of the Pentagon’s Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, Robert Pope, who claims that Russia’s military operation in Ukraine endangers a network of US-linked labs, which handle dangerous pathogens.

The Cooperative Threat Reduction Program is part of the so-called Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), which traces its roots back to the Manhattan Project – the American-led development of the world’s first functional atomic weapon.

And while Pope claims that the US military labs in Ukraine are not bioweapons facilities but public and animal health laboratories, he makes a number of startling revelations.

For starters, he confirms the existence of pathogens that can easily become infectious.

“If you lose the electrical power, the pathogens in the freezers warm up,” Pope explains.

“If the ventilation system is damaged, or the building itself is damaged, and these now ambient-temperature pathogens are able to escape the facility, then they can be potentially infectious.”

From there, Pope appears to try and build an alibi by suggesting the Russians “could potentially go to one of these facilities and fabricate something that they call evidence of nefarious activity.”

But the real kicker is Pope’s admission that these supposedly harmless facilities may hold pathogen strains left over from the Soviet bioweapons program.

“Scientists being scientists, it wouldn’t surprise me if some of these strain collections in some of these laboratories still have pathogen strains that go all the way back to the origins of that program,” the good doctor warns.

Perhaps equally alarming is the disclosure that 62% of this program’s USD 360 million budget is allocated for biological research.

The website of the US embassy in Kiev confirms the existence of this program. However, the fact sheets and PDF files detailing the operations of these facilities have been removed from the server. Whoever the Pentagon tasked with that mission wasn’t very thorough, as the original documents can still be found on the web archive.

If these were mere animal health laboratories, one would expect their financing to have come from the US Department of Health. But the documents show that the sole “donor” for each of these labs is the US Department of Defense. Moreover, all the facilities either had or were in the process of obtaining licenses to work with dangerous pathogens.

Two of the labs, in Kiev and Odessa, were undergoing some sort of additional construction. The sam.gov website, a central database that includes information about all US government contractors, reveals that the construction commenced in late July and was supposed to be completed within seven months – in late February.

Are these facilities really developing genetic tools that threaten the Russian population and pose the sort of “high risk” that Putin was referring to? No one can say for sure. But the involvement of shadowy characters like Pope and warnings from both Beijing and Moscow about opaque American military biolabs must be treated as more than just conspiracy theories.

What will it be like after the war?

The establishment of US military labs in former Soviet republics surrounding Russia is just another consequence of NATO’s 30-year-long eastward expansion. The same can be said for the wars in the Balkans, Georgia and of course, Ukraine.

NATO’s insistence on integrating these countries into the Western military alliance gave rise to very legitimate concerns in Moscow. While watching this powerful and hostile force inch closer toward its borders, the Russians spent the better part of the last three decades warning of the potential consequences.

At the start of 2022, NATO simply rebuffed Moscow’s core demands for formal security guarantees, sending a clear message that negotiations over such matters are impossible. It’s also the clearest indication yet that only Russia can guarantee its own security and that Moscow will likely have to remove threats along the country’s vast border by force.

As such, Moscow is no longer relaying its concerns via diplomatic channels. The Russian military is doing the talking now, and if the West is even remotely interested in averting a nuclear holocaust, they will need to listen carefully.

One of the more explicit attestations of the severity of this situation came from an unlikely source. At the end of February, Russian state television host Dmitry Kiselyov opened his primetime show by saying: “Why do we need a world if Russia is not in it?” 

Some people are still walking around thinking the world they knew just a few months ago still exists. But the old political structures and alliances are dead. So is the unipolar world. The old-world order is no longer.

These are tectonic shifts in the global balance of power that are historically accompanied by the outbreak of disease, uncompromising social divisions, economic hardship, and wars. Those who survive will live to tell the tale.

Father Elias Zahlawi: Syrian Priest’s Letters Rattle the Vatican

16 Nov 2021

Source: Al Mayadeen

Tim Anderson

Not once has the Pontiff pointed a finger at “Israel” or the USA for their roles in two decades of slaughter and ethnic cleansing, including the expulsion of Christians.

Syrian priest Father Elias Zahlawi has reportedly shaken Pope Francis over the Vatican’s vague statements on the US-driven Middle East wars. Not once has the Pontiff pointed a finger at “Israel” or the USA for their roles in two decades of slaughter and ethnic cleansing, including the expulsion of Christians.

While both men are in their 80s, Father Zahlawi has ministered in Damascus since the 1960s and, since 1975, at the Church of Our Lady of Damascus. Syrian-born, he studied in Jerusalem and founded the now famous Damascus ‘Choir of Joy’ in 1977. That huge choir has toured Europe.

Pope Francis attained the highest rank in the Catholic Church after being an Archbishop in Argentina, but he is said to be ‘haunted’ by accusations of his involvement in Argentina’s dirty war, carried out by a US-backed military dictatorship. No charge was ever laid against him but some years ago the Argentine judiciary found that the Catholic Church was “complicit in abuses”. 

According to some Syrian Christians, Father Zahlawi’s accusations over the Pope’s meaningless words – in face of the US and Israeli-led atrocities in Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen – touched a raw nerve. 

The gentle, humble priest in Damascus, now 89 years old, wrote a series of letters to US and Syrian leaders, to the European Parliament, and to the last two Popes. But his first two letters to Pope Francis, in 2018 and 2019, were probably the most incisive. 

On 29 June 2018, Father Zahlawi asked Pope Francis:

“Why don’t you decisively and unequivocally adopt this very clear position of Saint Peter, against a western world that has spared nothing in its pursuit of total and absolute world dominance … including the systematic and continuous killing and destruction of total peoples and countries, including my homeland Syria?

“All of that is happening … either with complete media silence or worse yet, with the roaring noise of fabricated “facts”, designed to give credence to the worst obscenities, under the banner of “human rights, democracy, and freedom”.

“I have continued to read ‘with sorrow and dismay’ … the Roman Observer, hoping that one day I will find in it even one word of activism, [but] to be honest I only find in it … empty words, of the usual clerical content that we have gotten used to since the Emperor Constantine, with very rare exceptions. Yet outside the Church, in the west, there are many courageous and honorable voices.”

On 12 February 2019, he wrote again, after the Pope’s address to ROACO, the Board of the Society for Support of the Eastern Churches, where Francis was reported to have denounced the “great sin of war”, the thirst for “domination” of great “World Powers” and a refugee crisis which carries with it the risk of “eliminating Christians” from the Middle East. 

This was a more carefully thought out letter, in which Father Zahlawi raised eight points. He began by asking, gently: “I wonder if the many grave issues you raised … did not deserve a clearer stand of more commitment and responsibility?” 

His first point was to do with the Pope’s refusal to address the ethnic cleansing in Palestine:

“You say that “In the Middle East there is also a danger … of eradicating the Christians” … [but] do you believe that your audience and consequently your readers are ignorant, as your words suggest, of the countries which strive, with open insistence, and since the establishment of Israel, to totally eradicate the Christian existence in the whole Near East at the time they are about to accomplish this in occupied Palestine, which you call “the land of Jesus” and which has become the land of injustice, vengeance and death, and whose true name has been obliterated to become only ‘The Holy Land’?

In a second point he refers to the failure of the Pope’s generic words about the “pain” of the Middle East, and of land theft by ‘World Powers’, to address the US-led assault on his own country, Syria: 

“these ‘World Powers’, at the head of which is the United States of America … forced about 140 member states countries … to declare war on my home country, Syria, and drove to it, from a hundred countries … jihadis, haunted by the evil of money, blood, avarice, and power.”

Third, Father Zahlawi chastises the Pope for suggesting that the “diminishing” numbers of Christians in the region might be due to pressure from Muslims. “If you want to suggest that the Muslims are the ones who force Christians to leave ‘the land they love’ … how can you explain their emigration at a worrisome rate since the establishment of “Israel” while they [Christians] throughout hundreds of years, lived … side by side with the Muslims?” 

In his fourth point, he asks if the Pope while speaking of the Middle East as ‘the cradle of Christianity’ can possibly be ignorant that the “the Judaising of occupied Palestine …will very soon end every presence of Christians in ‘the land of Jesus’?”

Fifth, with regard to the Pope’s references to “great churches” in the Middle East, and ignoring the role of “Israel”, Father Zahlawi says “what you are practically doing … shackled by a horrific and sickly guilt complex towards the Jews” is to ignore and close your eyes to “the atrocities that are being committed openly and in flagrant violation of all laws, against all the Arabs, Muslims and Christians equally”, while even “some distinguished Jews” speak out against these crimes.

Sixth, he finds fault in the Pope’s overly general words about “the Middle East … [as] a land of death and emigration”, as the pontiff says nothing about the displacement of 12 million of the 23 million people in Syria, “without pointing an accusing finger at those who are responsible for these planned and inhuman emigrations in a country that was considered, before the so-called Arab Spring, as one of the safest countries on earth?”

In a seventh point, Father Zahlawi cites the Pope’s reference to “the grave sin … the sin of war”. But what does this mean, he asks, “without pointing, in the end, an accusing finger to countries such as the United States of America, Britain, and France, on the global scope, and at “Israel” on the scope of the Middle East, as they do not stop exploding totally unjust war … [in the name of] Freedom, Democracy and Human Rights?”

Finally, he refers to the Pope’s call that “the Middle East is a hope that we must take care of”, linking this to a revelation said to have taken place in Soufaniyeh Alley in Damascus in 2014, in the midst of the war on Syria. This revelation likens the wounds on Syria to those on Jesus. The clear, implicit message is: why has Pope Francis not denounced those who, like Judas, betrayed the people of Syria? 

Breaking : President al-Assad and First Lady on a visit to Father Elias Zahlawi in the French hospital in Kassaa, Damascus .. pic.twitter.com/CEon368ipF

— Yusha Yuseef 🇸🇾 (@MIG29_) December 24, 2016

Open Letter To Pope Benedict XVI From Arab Catholic Priest Father Elias Zahlawi

 April 1, 2010

By Father Elias Zahlawi
Father, Your Holiness

During these hard and critical times, which the world in general and our Orient in particular is undergoing, I would like to take the opportunity to tell you what is going on in my mind, what burdens my heart, especially being an Arab Catholic priest from Syria, concerning the invitation you kindly extended a few months ago to those responsible for the Eastern Catholic Churches, to hold a convention during October 2010 to discuss the conditions Arab and non-Arab Christians are passing through throughout the countries of the Orient.

There are three points that I would like to raise and discuss with your Holiness, from a son to his father.

The first subject is in relation to this conference.

I trust that all those who received your kind invitation had lauded this initiative.

But did anybody tell you that it came too late?

I am sure that the papers, which were put into their hands received their “admiration”.

But did anybody tell your Holiness that they do not reflect the facts on the ground in our Orient, past and present, except what the West sees and wants the rest of the world to see, whether the people of the Orient like it or not?

I am certain that the Vatican’s “specialized experts” as well as your ambassadors in the Orient try to honesty report what’s going on in it.

But would any of those attending the convention, those “experts” and “ambassadors”, see in general anything bu what those responsible for the Churches of the Orient want them to see? Or what their sphere of responsibilities allows them to see?…

Last but not least, I am certain that those who shall be attending said convention had uncovered dangerous gaps in the “important” papers submitted to them.

But did anybody tell your Holiness personally or in public during the previous convention’s meetings, that there are gaps that they did not discover? And why not, the Vatican or its many or few Western “experts” just ignored in the absence or just the small number of Arab or Oriental experts?

The second point is concerning those invited to the previous and/or forthcoming councils.

It is well known that those invited are either patriarchs, archbishops and/or heads of the various monastic orders.

May I take the permission to ask your Holiness: are you fully convinced that those who are invited do really represent Oriental Christianity, in what is for or against it, especially during these critical, not to say fateful, times?

I am afraid that the majority of them are outside what the Orient as a whole expects of them, both and equally its Christians and Muslims, which is due to their costly stances and declarations, as they have learned due to their positions and their own personal considerations to avoid or mitigate them, which exclude them for incorporeal or material reasons, which is apparent to all.

I said that this conference came late… too late. But what I am afraid of is that it shall come out to the world with phoney introductions, and hollow resolutions and decisions or wishes that shall not bring advances, but rather may delay them too much, because it could add new and heavy failures and fiascos, over and above the historical heavy and exhausting weights, wrongful Western policies and internally confusing and sometimes shameful and floundering policies.

As a result, I found that it is necessary, with your permission, to suggest expending the span of invitations extended by the Apostolic See, to cover courageous and effective voices of various Christian circles both Catholic and Orthodox, both cleric and secularist, in addition to the various Islamic circles, especially as most of the inhabitants of the Orient are Muslims, it is supposed that what is to be said in this convention or what is to be issued by it, should concern them equally much as they concern Christians.

Point three, is the span of Western churches, especially the Vatican, regarding to what takes place all over the world, and especially to the Arab and non-Arab Orient.

My first question is: Is it possible that I could be distancing myself from truth if I say that everything that is taking place all over the world in general and in the Orient in particular, was done by the West, I mean the United States, Western Europe, Canada, Australia and Russia in particular, these countries that appropriate all the wealth of our globe, and solely possess the great part of the striking force around it up till now?

My second question is: Am I distancing myself from truth if I say that most of what is now taking place, first in the Arab homeland and in the Islamic world and in the second place in the Islamic areas all around the world, is nothing but a reaction to the West’s grievances, which are reactions that started and continued in most cases, demagogic, bloody and spontaneous, then some of them continued in two modes of armed movements, first legal resistance in occupied Palestine, which was unjustly described by the European Union in September 2002 as being carried out by groups they labelled as terrorist organizations, second the fundamentalist resistance, starting first in Afghanistan against Russia and later against U.S. aggression then in Iraq and Pakistan that was the case of the Taliban and the al Qaida movements.

But, is there anybody who doesn’t know that these two movements were originally created by the United States itself?

But what is taking place in the heart of the Arab homeland, which is Palestine in particular, Palestine, which you no more call it in your Western churches other than “The Holy Land”, are not but wrongful wars and occupation that deem permissible anything: killing, imprisoning, torturing, siege and displacement against all the Palestinian Arab people, Christians and Muslims, and all of that is taking place under the eye sight of the entire world, with full support of the West, and what made Mrs. Clinton say: “Attacking Israel is equal to attacking an American city like “San Diego”, and what made Mrs. Merkel, the German Chancellor, say also shamelessly: “Attacking Tel Aviv is exactly like attacking Germany in particular…”.

But what has taken place and is still taking place against Palestinian Arabs by “Israeli” Zionist occupation!

What is the relation between what happened and what is happening to the Palestinian Arab people, for longer than sixty years, by Zionist “Israeli” hands, if compared to human rights as announced in “The Human Rights Charter”, and all international treaties, especially the Geneva Conventions, as well as hundreds of resolutions taken against “Israel” by the United Nations and its miserable Security Council? Did all the West become a slave to Zionism, to follow these dissolute double standards in the West’s relations with the Zionist entity on the one hand and the rest of the world on the other, which are the weak and deemed weak peoples, on the other hand?

With all of that, all European Churches keep silent. Yes we mean all of them, starting with the Vatican itself. It kept silent after the passing away of Pope John Paul II, with the exception of the courageous the Cardinal of Boston, Bernard Law.

I have been thoroughly and regularly reading for years the Vatican’s daily newspaper “corriereromano” http://www.websiteoutlook.com/www.corriereromano.it, and was aware that since you became Pope, its language was flattened and neutralized in relation to the Arab / Zionist conflict, and the same concerning war tragedies, hunger, diseases, poverty, exploitation, forgery and organized plundering, which are tragedies that their beastly spreading over the world is aggravating… day in and day out!

This became apparent in a grievous manner during your personal visit to occupied Palestine, I expected from you words that are at least equal in courage and trueness of that your predecessor, Pope John Paul II, the moment he laid foot on the land of Syria in 2001, as he immediately demanded the execution of United Nations resolutions for a just and comprehensive solution of the Arab / Zionist struggle!

I was also expecting from you words, which are sympathetic, strong and courageous towards the Palestinian Arab people, that Zionism had been subjugating for more than sixty years to a terrible and continuous uninterrupted “Shoah” (Holocaust), with unlimited Western support, words that are at least a little equal to the sweeping sympathy that you expressed towards the Jewish “people”, for example what you expressed during your meeting with some of its American leaders during your visit to the United States on Feb. 12th 2009, and during the visit of the leading “Israeli” Rabbis to the Vatican on March 12th 2009! As for what you said on January 1st 2010 on the memory day of the “Shoah”, which the “corriereromano” (Page 2) that expresses that what is taking place in what remains of Palestine (The West Bank and the Gaza Strip) for over sixty years is completely absent from your memory!

I regret to add that the complete silence of Western churches was expressed in wretched words written by some Catholic bishops in France, Germany and Canada after their visits to the “Holy Land”, where they equated between the Arab victim and the Zionist butcher. They also expressed their “great” disturbance for the pains both peoples are suffering, and they were always concluding their word with calling on their peoples to raise prayers for “peace”, and to give financial help to the: “Holy Lands”.

We feel as if they have lost their eyesight, and they can no more see, erased their brains and thus can no more remember the history of Palestine, the homeland of Jesus Christ, neither the old nor the contemporary, and the vital change that is taking place in this homeland in its historical landmarks. And what happened to its indigenous population, Christians and Muslims, of massacres, displacement and genocide/extermination!

Father, Your Holiness,
At last, I have six questions, that I find necessary to raise to you at the end of this letter:

1st Question: does the anti-Semitism that the West, the Church, authority and people, practiced against the Jews, justify today’s spilling the blood of the people of the Arab and non-Arab East, starting with Palestinian Arabs, for the sake of the “poor” Jewish “people”? And does it justify all Western Churches keeping silence, concerning this injustice, while they continue to request remission for the sin of anti-Semitism, that it alone committed, excluding Arabs and Muslims?

2nd Question: isn’t it clear for all the West including these Western Churches, that this situation shall end up with two formidable evils that I find no possible forgiveness for:

The first evil, is the transforming of all the “poor” Jewish “people” to become a group of killers?

The second evil, is the emptying of all the Orient from its indigenous Christians?

3rd Question: Don’t you see with me a fearful and shameful similarity between what all Western powers are doing today all over the world in general and the Arab homeland and the Islamic world in particular, and what Western powers, which invaded the American continents starting with the 15th century had done? I mean the savage and systematic extermination of about forty to fifty million people of the indigenous population as per Western researchers themselves?

4th question, in facing all these crimes against humanity, is it enough that a new Pope to come, after four hundred years, requests the forgiveness from the slaughtered peoples, as the brave Paul John Paul II did, during his extraordinary visits to the world, so as the Church would say the Church had done what it had to do?

5th question, is it not necessary for Western churches today, and before tomorrow to get out of their silence, and speak the Gospel’s words, to defend the wronged, the poor, the hungry, the sick and the prisoners of war that Jesus identified all his love for them, who are no more individuals as Matthew the Apostle’s gospel said? On the contrary, they became peoples who cover the greater part of the world? Some may hear it and we be able to liberate some of the Western, the “rich” and the “haughty”, whether those who were fully liberated from God, or those who exploited him, as what is taking place in the United States of America, so as to finish of, in his name, with the Christians and the Muslims of all the Orient, and stir the peoples against each other, through sectarian and ethnic wars that spread day after day, and shall not grant mercy to anybody?

6th Question, which is a question that I hear you forwarding to me, as many Western bishops and priests had already addressed it to me: But “is there anybody to hear?” In turn I shall tell you and the whole Western Church: You are no better then Jesus, “He came to his special people, but they didn’t accept him”. But in spite of that, he spoke, and what Jesus said, nobody had ever said it, and nobody shall ever say it!

Yes, Your Holiness, I have something else to add.

Father, Your Holiness, please, I am your son, the Arab Catholic priest from Syria, I beg you, with all the love and importunity, to take the initiative and invite the truthful elite of those responsible in Western Churches and secularists, so as to discuss with those responsible and the truthful in the Eastern Churches and the rest of the world to discuss, discuss with Christians and Muslims, during the forthcoming convention, which you called for in October 2010, about the responsibilities of what is taking place today in the Orient and the rest of the world, so as to take the required and sincere stances before it is too late.

A lot of time has passed, and days are pregnant with new tragedies, that nobody wishes upon anybody else.

God’s world is spacious, as spacious as God’s heart, so I hope that your heart shall be spacious enough to grasp my words,

You, Your Holiness,

I beg you to pray for all my brethren in the Orient, Muslims, Christians and Jews, please accept your son’s love and respect.

Father Elias Zahlawi  – 13/3/2010

Translated from Arabic by: Adib S. Kawar and revised by Mary Rizzo for Tlaxcala

This letter was published at the Palestine Think Tank on March 22, 2010

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The Dangerous Alliance of Rothschild and the Vatican of Francis

22.12.2020 

Author: F. William Engdahl

Holy Moly! The most globalist and interventionist Pope since the Crusades of the 12th Century has formalized an alliance with the largest figures in global finance led by none other than that noble banking family, Rothschild. The new alliance is a joint venture they call “Council for Inclusive Capitalism with the Vatican.” The venture is one of the more cynical and given the actors, most dangerous frauds being promoted since Davos WEF guru and Henry Kissinger protégé, Klaus Schwab, began to promote the Great Reset of the world capitalist order. What and is behind this so-called Council for Inclusive Capitalism with the Vatican?

On their website they proclaim in a typical UN doublespeak, “The Council for Inclusive Capitalism is a movement of the world’s business and public sector leaders who are working to build a more inclusive, sustainable, and trusted economic system that addresses the needs of our people and the planet.” A more sustainable, trusted economic system? Doesn’t that sound like the infamous UN Agenda 21 and its Agenda 2030 daughter, the globalist master plan? They then claim, “Inclusive Capitalism is fundamentally about creating long-term value for all stakeholders – businesses, investors, employees, customers, governments and communities.”

They continue, “Council members make actionable commitments aligned with the World Economic Forum International Business Council’s Pillars for sustainable value creation—People, Planet, Principles of Governance, and Prosperity—and that advance the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.”

In announcing the deal with the Vatican, Lynn Forester de Rothschild declared, “This Council will follow the warning from Pope Francis to listen to ‘the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor’ and answer society’s demands for a more equitable and sustainable model of growth.”

Their reference to Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum is no accident. The group is yet another front group in what is becoming a globalist bum’s rush to try to convince a skeptical world that the same people who created the post-1945 model of IMF-led globalization and giga-corporate entities more powerful than governments, destroying traditional agriculture in favor of toxic agribusiness, dismantling living standards in industrialized countries to flee to cheap labor countries like Mexico or China, will now lead the effort to correct all their abuses? We are being naïve if we swallow this.

Rothschild and pals

First off it is useful to see who are the “inclusive” capitalists joining forces with the Pope and Vatican. The founder is a lady who carries the name Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild. She is the wife of the 90-year old retired mega-billionaire head of London’s NM Rothschilds Bank, Sir Evelyn de Rothschild. Lady Lynn however is from “commoner” roots, born into a US working class family in New Jersey whose father, as she tells, worked two jobs to put her and her brothers through law and medical schools. She seemed to have had some influential mentors, as she went to Wall Street then to telecoms including Motorola and made reported tens of millions before hooking up with Sir Evelyn and his reported $20 billion in assets. Reports have it that Henry Kissinger played a personal role in encouraging the Transatlantic union of the two.

Lady Lynn is interesting as well beyond her famous husband. According to the list of names of those who flew on the private jet of convicted child sex trafficker and reported Mossad operative Jeffrey Epstein, one name that appears is “de Rothschild, Lynn Forester.”

It is interesting to note, that the same Lynn Forester in 1991, before she took Sir Evelyn as her husband, generously let a British friend have full use of one of Lynn’s Manhattan apartment properties, following the apparent murder of the woman’s father, British media tycoon and Mossad agent, Robert Maxwell. The British friend of Lynn, Ghislaine Maxwell, today is awaiting trial for complicity in child sex trafficking as the partner of Jeffrey Epstein. Maxwell reportedly maintained the Manhattan address of Lady Lynn until very recently to register a bizarre non-profit called Terramar that she and Epstein set up in 2012, allegedly aimed at saving our oceans. When Epstein was arrested she quickly dissolved the non-profit. One of the donors to Ghislaine’s TerraMar was something called the Clinton Foundation, which leads to the next friend.

Lady Lynn has another long-time friend named Hillary Clinton, whose husband, Bill, was also logged on Epstein’s Lolita Express private jet, around two dozen times. Lynn and her new husband, Sir Evelyn, in fact were so close to the Clintons that in 2000 the Rothschild newlyweds spent part of their honeymoon as guests at the White House of Mr and Mrs Clinton. Lady Lynn after that became a major fund-raiser in 2008 and again 2016 for a possible Hillary bid for President, called a “bundler.” She also advised Hillary on her economic program, a free market one based on Adam Smith as she described it in an interview once.

Lady Lynn’s “Guardians”

The Rothschild venture with the Vatican at this point, in addition to co-founder Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, includes hand-picked money moguls and their select foundations who pompously call themselves the “Guardians.” That’s a term sounding more like a South Side Chicago gang or some kind of mafia overlords. They call themselves the moral guardians, together now with their new friends at the Vatican, for reform of capitalism.

The Guardian member list includes Rajiv Shah, the CEO of the Rockefeller Foundation, and former partner of the Gates Foundation’s AGRA scam to introduce GMO seeds in Africa. The Rockefeller Foundation has been involved in promoting a pandemic “lockdown” since 2010, and is a core part of the WEF Great Reset agenda. He just released a Rockefeller report, Reset the Table: Meeting the Moment to Transform the US Food System.

Rothschild’s Guardians also include Darren Walker the CEO of the Ford Foundation. Those two foundations, Ford and Rockefeller, have done more to shape an imperial American foreign policy than even the US State Department or CIA, including the funding of the failed Green Revolution in India and Mexico, and the creation by Rockefeller funds of GMO crops.

The head of DuPont, a GMO giant and chemicals group is another Guardian as well as scandal-ridden vaccine and drug companies, Merck and Johnson & Johnson. Merck lied about the risks of its arthritis drug Vioxx until more than 55,000 users died of heart attacks. Johnson & Johnson has been involved in numerous frauds in recent years including around negative effects of its anti-psychotic drug Risperdal, illegal presence of cancer-causing asbestos in its baby powder, and potentially thousands of legal actions for its role as a leading supplier of the opioid in Purdue Pharma’s deadly prescription painkiller OxyContin.

Other Guardians include CEOs of Visa, Mastercard, Bank of America, Allianz insurance, BP. In 2016 Visa along with USAID were behind the catastrophic Modi experiment to introduce a cashless economy in India.

Notable also is Guardian Mark Carney, former Bank of England head and also advocate of cashless digital central bank currencies to replace the dollar. Carney is now United Nations Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance.

Carney is also a Board member of the Davos World Economic Forum, the public promoter of the Global Reset of capitalism to impose the dystopian Agenda 2030 “sustainable” economy. In fact several of Rothschild’s Guardians are on the WEF Board, including billionaire Marc Benioff, founder of cloud computing Salesforce, and OECD head Angel Gurria. And ex-Credit Suisse CEO, Tidjane Thiam is on the International Business Council of the World Economic Forum.

Other Guardians of the inclusive capitalism transformation include the head of Bank of America, which bank was sued by the US Government for fraud connected with the 2008 US subprime mortgage crisis, as well as for laundering money for the deadly Mexican drug cartels and Russian organized crime. The select Guardian list also includes Marcie Frost, the controversial head of CalPERS, the huge fraud-ridden California state pension fund managing over $360 billion.

The head of State Street Corporation, one of the world’s largest asset management companies with US$3.1 trillion under management, is another Guardian. In January 2020 State Street announced it would vote against directors of companies in major stock indices that do not meet targets for environmental, social and governance changes. This is what is called Green Investing, as part of so-called Socially Responsible Investing. The WEF strategy, pushed also by WEF board members like Larry Fink of BlackRock, reward companies that they deem “socially responsible.” This is the key to the inclusive capitalism agenda of not just Rothschild’s inclusive capitalism Guardians, but also the WEF.

Their website claims that the Guardians manage more than $10.5 trillion dollars and control companies that employ 200 million workers. Now a brief look at their new Vatican partner.

Vatican Morals?

Ironically, or maybe not, Pope Francis, the partner chosen to give Rothschild’s group of mega-capitalists “moral” credibility, is himself embroiled in what could be the largest financial scandals, fraud and misuse of church funds in the modern history of the Vatican. That, despite the fact Pope Francis declared as new Pope in 2013, one of his main tasks would be to clean up the scandal-ridden Vatican finances. That has hardly taken place even after more than six years. Some Vatican observers even claim the financial corruption has worsened.

The unravelling scandal revolves around now-disgraced Cardinal Angelo Becciu who until 2018 was de facto chief-of-staff to the Pope and regular confidante. Becciu was Substitute for General Affairs in the Secretariat of State, a key position in the Roman Curia until June, 2018 when the pope elevated him to Cardinal, ironically enough, responsible for the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. Becciu, clearly no saint, was able to invest hundreds of millions even billions over years of Church funds, including donations for the poor in Peter’s Pence, into projects he chose with a former banker from Credit Suisse. Projects included €150 million share in a luxury London real estate complex and $1.1 million into a film, Rocketman, about the life of Elton John. That comes to light as the ongoing Vatican child sex scandals caused Pope Francis to defrock Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, the first Cardinal to fall in the Church’s deep sexual abuse charges.

Italian press reports that the Pope knew about the dubious investments of Becciu and even praised them before the depth of the scandals broke. In November, 2020 Italian police raided the residence of Becciu’s former Vatican accountant and found €600,000 in cash and evidence the Vatican employee received $15 million in fake invoicing over years.

With a background like this, the new Council for Inclusive Capitalism with the Vatican of Lynn de Rothschild warrants close scrutiny as they clearly plan big things along with Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum to “reform” the world economy, and it won’t be nice or moral we can be sure.

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Constantinople & the world – the real story

October 16, 2020

by Giorgi Nektarios Selimos for the Saker Blog

Please read my words & think about what has happened.
Normal people are not to blame here it is the sin of Greed & Lust for money & power that is responsible. If you truly believe in Christ nothing is lost. But after you read this you must decide what to do as you will know the Truth & God will not hold you blameless.

The Throne of the Pope is an interesting case as there is no evidence in the Bible or any Historical religious texts there was ever 1 single Bishop that should or did preside over all other churches in Christianity.
The Word Pope in the context as the Universal leader is never mentioned by any of the Apostles in the Bible or any Bishops from the 5 churches of the Apostles during the Time of Christ on the Earth.

The 1st Bishop of the church in Rome was Pius 1 (142-155) & he never mentioned the Word Pope or ever referred to being the Universal leader of Christians during his service to the Lord & the people of Rome.

For the 1st 1000 years after Christ the Church was essentially one body that had 5 Historical Patriarchal Centres in Strategic locations as advised to by Christ himself & the Mutual agreement of all of the 12 apostles.
As seen in the Bible the Apostles worked as a team with their churches & consulted each other on troubling issues from time to time & were always in full communion with each other.

This is not to say that there was no differences as is clearly exhibited in the Bible when Apostle Paul argues with Peter for not wanting to except ALL people into the Church as Christians. Paul argued with Peter that Jewish laws & customs should NOT be applied to non Jews in order for them to be accepted in the Church. Peter thought that EVERYONE HAD to follow Jewish Laws & customs to be accepted by Christ.

In the end the Apostles agreed with Paul & Peter accepted the decision & so Christianity was able to be spread to the whole world. This documented event in the Bible clearly shows that NO ONE Apostle was the Supreme leader, and that all Apostles worked together in their faith to spread the Words of Christ.

From the Original Christian churches in Jerusalem, Antioch(Syria), Rome(Italy), Alexandria(Egypt), & Constantinople(Greece) the Apostles Spread the word of God. But were persecuted & tortured & murdered by Romans & non Believers .

In 306 Constantine the Roman Emperor had fought his way to power in Rome & had managed to become Emperor for all the Roman Empire. Early on his reign Constantine was a beneficiary of a miracle of Christ
( Battle of the Milvian Bridge) & became a firm believer in Christ & Christ’s teachings & ended the persecution of all Christians.

In Honour of his new found faith in Christ, Constantine decided to built a new Capital for the Roman Empire in the Eastern predominately Christian Greek area of the Roman Empire. He would name this new spectacular city Constantinople & build the Worlds Grandest Church there ” The Church of the Apostles” or “Ayia Sophia’ it was laden with Gold, Marble, jewels, & the finest materials in all mankind it was spectacular in appearance & magnificent in stature. The Russian Royal Delegation would later describe it to Prince Vladimir of Russia as: “When we entered this place of worship we did not know if we were in Heaven or on Earth”

Emperor Constantine would seek to Unite his empire in Christian faith under this Orthodox Church.
In fact Constantine was incredibly successful & Christianity flourished under his rule.
In 325 Constantine established the Council of Nicea , where all Religious matters of the 5 original Apostolic Churches were to be worked out together . Emperor Constantine set up a system where all the Bishops of each church would work together under the Orthodox Church & have full communion with each other.

It was a good democratic system where no one Bishop or Politician could rule alone & where the Emperor would still retain authority of the whole Roman Empire.

Constantine wisely understood that in order for the Roman Empire to remain Strong he needed to keep the Church strong unlike politics this was the one way he could unite the citizens of the Empire in a good manner. To be certain, differences did occur in some religious matters from time to time but ultimately were resolved or not allowed to interfere with the continuation of the Church. Such was a dispute with the Nicene creed, the Roman church Bishop had disagreed with the Orthodox church Bishops of the East on this. The Roman Bishop refused to agree with any of the other Bishops on this issue. So they just defered the matter & nothing was officially changed until the Great Schism of the Roman church.

During his reign, Emperor Constantine built St Peters Basilica in Rome directly over the Apostle Peter’s Tomb. This was done so as to greatly honour the Apostle Peter who had spent much of his time Preaching in Rome .
It took 30 years to build starting in 326. It was a grand Church but not close in stature to the Headquarters Church Constantine had built in the Eastern part of the empire in his new capital of Constantinople.

After Emperor Constantine’s death his successor’s would succumb to political pressure from the Rich & Old Guard Romans who wanted to shift government power back to Rome.
The Political Elite had seen how Constantine had managed to gain peace, great power & riches through the Unification of the empire under one church & most certainly were thinking of a way that they too could emulate his success. But they did not want to operate from this new Roman Empire Capital of Constantinople.

They were desperate to find a way to make Rome the power centre once again. The Great Orthodox Church that Constantine had built & united his empire in Christianity with, was caught in the middle of this political struggle with Western Roman elites & a lot of power & money was at stake. Not to mention many Roman politicians still found it difficult not worshipping the Old Roman Idols from previous Emperors & retaining the mentality of worshiping any Idol they believed would make them rich & powerful.
They were not too concerned about true salvation, much like many of today’s politicians who clearly pretend to be whatever they need to be in order to get elected. They were more interested in Power & money & sex. At the same time the Church in Rome also got caught up in this political power struggle.

Between religious disagreement with the four original eastern orthodox churches & the political pressure to undo Constantinople as the Roman capital, The Roman Church & Bishops were greatly effected & started to break away from the other 4 remaining Patriarchs of the Original church.

During this time the Roman Church bishops suddenly & mysteriously produced
“The Donation of Constantine Decree” a brilliantly forged Imperial Decree in which the now dead Emperor Constantine transfers authority over Rome & all the Western part of the Empire to the Pope .

In this fake decree Constantine purportedly agreed his throne would only retain Imperial Authority in the Eastern part of the Roman empire & rule only from his new imperial capital of Constantinople & was also agreed the Pope of the Roman Church could have control of the rest of the Empire.
The Forged Imperial Decree claimed it was a gift to Pope Sylvester 1 for teaching Emperor Constantine about Christianity , baptizing him, & curing him of Leprosy.
This Forged Decree continued to be of great use to the Roman Church & was used by successive Popes to solidify power acquire more territory & gain more converts.
This document was also used in the Roman Empire as a Propaganda tool for the Roman Church to claim Universal Supremacy over the remaining 4 unified apostolic orthodox churches.

The 1st Pope who had the audacity to use this Forged document in an official act against all the other churches was Pope Leo IX who in an officially recorded letter to the Patriarch of Constantinople in 1054 declared to the remaining 4 Churches of the Apostles that Indeed it was the Roman Church who clearly had Universal Supremacy over all Christians as was the proof under the seal of the Emperor Constantine as well as under a loosely translated reference (Matthew:16:18 ) made in the Bible. The Roman Church then demanded that everyone bow down to them & except this for fact.

When the Orthodox Patriarchs refused, the Roman Pope split away & officially created the Roman Catholic Church independent of the Orthodox churches, thus creating new religious decrees such as celibacy for clergy, no divorce, & the new revelation that the Pope was the infallible Vicar of Christ as well as numerous other new rules that were never part of the original church.

This was the year 1054 & the Roman Church had now officially split with the remaining 4 Original Apostolic Orthodox churches.
It was to be known as the great Schism.
The Roman Church was now officially alone & the 1st church in History of Christianity to split from the remaining Apostolic Orthodox churches.

It was now the 4 Original Orthodox Patriarchal Churches remaining as one, just as they still remain almost 1,000 years later today. The 4 remaining church’s managed to come to an agreement together & agreed not to bow down to the self proclaimed Universal Supremacy of the Roman Pope & all his new rules. It was only due to Christ’s miraculous enlightenment that the Orthodox Bishops did not believe the lies of the Pope & his forged decree.
The Original Apostolic Churches were not lost.

Eventually Pope Pius in 1453 admitted that the decree was a forgery & just as it had suddenly appeared, it was suddenly never seen again & nor ever mentioned or used again by the Roman Church & Pope.
By this time though the Muslim Armies of the East had gained horrific strength & were ravaging the Eastern Parts of the Roman Empire. This area was precisely where the majority of Christians still lived & was the heart of the remaining Apostolic Orthodox Churches.

In 1421 the Officials in Constantinople sent word to the Rome that they needed more help from the Roman Soldiers stationed in the West as the Muslims were barbarically slaughtering people & forcing them to refute Christianity & convert to Islam under the sharp blades of Muslim swords.
Constantinople was clearly still part of the Roman Empire but over the years had developed strained relations with the Roman Government & the Roman Church. The Orthodox Church in Constantinople had become a sore spot for many Roman political & Church leaders. The request for military assistance reached Rome but It was decided by the Roman Government & Pope not to send help to the East & let the current army reserves there try & fend for themselves.

The Emperor & the Pope sensing political opportunity to be finally rid of Constantinople & have Rome return to its rightful position of glory decided to fortify the Western empire & protect it at all costs , the Muslims were never able to get through to Rome & the Popes Roman Church was unscathed.

In Constantinople & the Eastern part of the Empire this resulted in the Unholy Slaughter & Barbaric killings of Bishops, Priests & Christian men of all ages, Women were raped & brutally murdered, children taken into slavery & Christian Churches destroyed or turned into Muslim Mosques including the Grand Church Constantine had built “the Ayia Sophia” which now has once again has been converted from museum to a mosque in 2020 .

The previous Pope John Paul was the 1st & only Pope to acknowledge this great sin against humanity & ask forgiveness from the Orthodox believers in Christ for what the Roman Church did to their ancestors.

This Mass slaughter of the Eastern Roman Empire had now resulted in the Roman Church being the only functioning church left in the Empire. With the Muslims effectively killing all Orthodox Bishops & priests & not allowing any remaining survivors freedom of religion the Roman Catholic church was poised to become the #1 Church in the world.

From this point on the Roman Catholic church did not look back & eventually embarked on the infamous Catholic Crusades & Witch Burnings. The Pope was finally free to spread the Roman brand of religion to the world unopposed.
Catholicism became the #1 Church & religion in the World & The Pope’s Dream of undisputed power in all matters was now realized, all thanks to the mass slaughter of the Orthodox Christians by the Muslims.

It was the Russians & Ukrainians during this bleak time for the Orthodox church that were able to keep the 4 Original Apostolic Churches memory & Traditions alive & in fact rebuild many exact replicas of these great churches in their countries including the Ayia Sophia which was rebuilt in Kiev, Ukraine & still stands to this day as an Orthodox church.

The Muslims were never successful in Conquering Russia & the Orthodox Church flourished in Russia. Attaining still to this day the highest number of churches per capita in the world. Even during the times of communism this fact did not change.
That is how strong the Orthodox faith was & is today. The Orthodox Church of Constantinople where Constantine had ended Christian persecutions & started the flourishing of the Christianity movement was gone…..

But the faith remained.

The Roman Church had now decided it was time to make St Peters Basilica the New centre of Christianity. Pope Julius II embarked on a grand reconstruction plan. Pope Julius II began by destroying Constantine’s original Church of St Peter & rebuilding one on top of the original Vatican grave yard .
Pope Julius also had All the original Orthodox Crosses from St Peter’s Church removed & replaced with new Latin crosses. The Pope then gloriously installed the famous Heliopolis Obelisk courtesy of the evil & debaucherous Roman Emperor Caligula.

This became a Grand church and was thereafter widely publicized as the Greatest Church on earth & the new centre of Christianity.
Later on in the mid 1930’s the Dictator & Ally of Adolf Hitler, Mussolini would add a Grand Monumental Avenue leading to the Piazza. Only the Pope is allowed to celebrate Catholic Mass on this Alter & no one else.

I want to make it absolutely clear that the Roman Catholic believers are not at fault for this lust for power & money in the history of the Roman Catholic Church. Most Catholic believers don’t know any of this.

The Roman Catholic worshipers clearly believe in Christ, but unfortunately have been deceived by there church leaders & Roman politicians over the centuries. All in a lustful quest for power & money.
I believe that it is possible some Popes wanted to stop, but the deceit had gone too far & rather than expose it & risk dangerous consequences they probably asked Christ for forgiveness & just carried on the lies.

Other Popes mysteriously died or were removed .
I truly do admire the previous Pope John Paul for his courage to acknowledge the great Schism & ask for forgiveness. I think he was a good man & the only Pope who came close to reconciling with the Original Church. But Tragically by the time he had gotten to this point he died.

I am worried that many Catholics are starting to lose their faith in Christ because of all the repeated sexual scandals & of their clergy & the court ordered payouts forcing many churches into bankruptcy as well as many of the negative movies being made about their church.
The Catholic believers must understand that this has nothing to do with Christ & it is all the doings of their Leaders.
I want them to know that they were once part of the Orthodox Church & they should consider coming back rather than giving up.

عندما تسبق الاساطيل المساعدات وحرب المرافئ والطرق…!

محمد صادق الحسيني

لا معنى ولا مكان للصدفة في السنن الكونية وكلّ شيء بقدر وبيروت ليست استثناء…!

انفجار هائل في ميناء بيروت، يدمّر الميناء بشكل كامل ويدمّر عشرات آلاف المنازل في الأحياء المجاوره، بتاريخ ٤/٨/٢٠٢٠، تبعه بتاريخ ٩/٨/٢٠٢٠ اجتماع دولي عن طريق الفيدو كونفرنس، بين جهات دولية لبحث إمكانيات مساعدة لبنان بعد الكارثه، قيل إنّ المشاركين فيه أبدوا استعدادهم، للرئيس الفرنسي، بمساعدة لبنان بثلاثمائة مليون دولار. لكن القطع الحربية الفرنسية، التي كانت موجودة في شرق البحر المتوسط، قد وصلت المياه الإقليمية اللبنانية قبل وصول ايّ مساعدات، سواء من فرنسا او من غيرها من الدول.

كان هذا التحرك العسكري الفرنسي، المنسق مع الأسطول السادس الأميركي، عبارة عن أداة التمهيد لزيارة الرئيس الفرنسي ماكرون للبنان، بتاريخ ١٣/٨/٢٠٢٠، ما يعني انّ الحملة الديبلوماسية الفرنسية كانت ولا تزال تتمتع بغطاء حربي من أسطولين في شرق المتوسط، الأسطول السادس الأميركي والأسطول الفرنسي، الأمر الذي يوضح بجلاء انّ وراء الأكمة ما وراءها.

وهذا ما اتضح، من خلال مسار زيارة ماكرون الأولى للبنان، وما تبعها من تصريحات لبنانية داخلية، حول مقولة الحياد، ثم التصريح الذي أدلى به البابا فرنسيس، قبل أيام، وفي تناغم مع تصريحات لبنانية داخلية أطلقتها بعض الجهات المعروفة الارتباطات، والذي جاء فيه (تصريح البابا) انّ لبنان يمرّ بفترة صعبة ولا يجب التخلي عنه.

وبالعودة الى كارثة الانفجار نفسها، فإننا وبغضّ النظر عن تفاصيل أسباب الانفجار ومسبّباته، وهل كان عرضياً أو مدبّراً، وما إذا كان نتج عن ضربة خارجية او من خلال عمل تخريبي، عن طريق عملاء على الأرض، فإننا مقتنعون تماماً بأنّ هذا الانفجار كان عملاً مدبّراً، منذ لحظة شراء نيترات الأمونيوم، من فرع شركة أسترالية في ميناء جبل علي بدبي، وحتى وصولها الى ميناء بيروت وتخزينها هناك طوال هذه السنين، بانتظار لحظة الحاجة الى تفجيرها، كان عملاً مخططاً بدقة وتقف وراءه أجهزة استخبارات دولية، كانت تتابع كلّ ما يجري في لبنان، من النواحي الاقتصادية والسياسية والعسكرية والأمنية، ولديها ما يكفي من مواد التفجير اللازمة لقلب الأوضاع رأساً على عقب، سواء في لبنان أو في المنطقة أو حتى على صعيد أوسع وأبعد.

من هنا فإننا نعتقد بقوة انّ هدف من دبّر عملية التفجير، والذي يُفترض انه بات معروفاً للكثيرين، قد شمل في أهدافه أكثر من مجال أهمّها:

1

ـ الأهداف التكتيكية، المحدودة جغرافياً، والمتعلقة بتفجير الأوضاع اللبنانية الداخلية، في وجه حلف المقاومة ودرّة تاجه في لبنان، حزب الله، خلطاً للأوراق وتمهيداً لشنّ حملة عاتية ضدّه، تؤدّي الى شنّ أو طلب شنّ عدوان أميركي «إسرائيلي» على لبنان وحزب الله، تمهيداً لنزع سلاحه، تماماً كما حصل مع الجيش السوري سنة ٢٠٠٥، اثر اغتيال رفيق الحريري، الذي كان مخططاً بدقه، وربما من قبل نفس الجهة التي نفذت تفجير ميناء بيروت أوائل آب من هذا العام.

2

ـ قطع الطريق على ايّ تعاون اقتصادي، او من ايّ نوع آخر، بين إيران ولبنان، خاصة بعد المقترحات التي تقدّم بها سماحة الامين العام لحزب الله السيد حسن نصر الله، والتي تضمّنت القيام بتنفيذ العديد من المشروعات الاقتصادية الاستراتيجية، من قبل شركات إيرانية، ودون تكليف الخزينة اللبنانية أية أعباء مالية، حيث كان يُفترض أن تنفذ بواسطة معادلة: البناء ثم التشغيل، من قبل الشركة المنفذة، لاسترجاع استثماراتها، ومن ثم تسليم المشروع للدولة اللبنانية.

3

ـ توجيه ضربة استراتيجية لمشروع الصين العملاق، طريق واحد وحزام واحد، وذلك من خلال تدمير ميناء بيروت بالكامل، وإفشال كلّ المحاولات الصينية للدخول الى السوق اللبناني، سواء في القطاع البحري من بناء وتوسيع موانئ او من خلال نشاطات الشحن البحري وتطويره. وكذلك الأمر بالنسبة الى النقل البري، الشوارع الدولية وسكك الحديد، او النقل الجوي، عبر تطوير المطارات الموجودة وإنشاء أخرى جديدة. إضافة الى قطاع الكهرباء وقطاعات صناعية أخرى في لبنان، مما يأخذ لبنان باتجاه الاندماج او التكامل الاقتصادي مع محيطه العربي، الأمر الذي يفتح آفاقاً عابرة للقارات لهذا الاقتصاد الصغير والمثقل بالديون، ونقله من هذا الوضع المنهار الى وضع مزدهر مستديم النمو، وتمتدّ حدود نشاطه من سواحل المتوسط غرباً وحتى سواحل الصين وروسيا الشرقية على المحيط الهادئ شرقاً.

ولكن الرياح لم تأتِ كما اشتهت سفن المخططين لهذا العمل الإجرامي، الذي يرتقي الى مستوى قصف المدن اليابانية بالقنابل الذرية، وقتل مئات الآلاف من سكانها المدنيين الأبرياء، ذلك القصف الأميركي الذي تمّ تنفيذه بتاريخ ٦ /٨ ١٩٤٥ و ٩ /٨ /١٩٤٥، ما يجعل تقارب تاريخ تفجير ميناء بيروت مع تاريخ القصف النووي الأميركي للمدن اليابانية يثير الكثير من التساؤلات لدى كلّ من لديه منطق سياسي يعتمد على تحليل المعادلات الرياضية وليس على كيل التهم السياسية للآخرين دون ايّ حجج او دليل.

نقول انّ الرياح لم تأتِ كما اشتهت سفن المخططين لهذا العمل الإجرامي لأنهم كانوا ينامون على أوهام انّ جريمة تفجير ميناء بيروت ستحقق لهم أهدافهم كلها بضربةٍ واحدة، بضربةٍ قاضية تنهي الخطر الوجودي، على دويلة الاحتلال الإسرائيلي، وتفرغ انتصارات محور المقاومة، على مدى السنوات الأخيرة الماضية، من محتواها، وتكرّس «إسرائيل» قوةً إقليميةً، تواصل دورها التدميري، الذي يمنع ايّ تعاون او تكامل اقتصادي عربي، او عربي موحد مع تكتلات اقتصادية إقليمية أو دولية موحدة.

فها هي جمهورية الصين الشعبية، وكما نشر الكاتب الأميركي، إيتش آي ساتون، في مجلة «فوربس» الأميركيه، بتاريخ ٣/٩/٢٠٢٠، نقلاً عن تقرير لوزارة الحرب الأميركية جاء فيه انّ سلاح البحرية الصينية قد زوّد طرادات ومدمّرات بصواريخ باليستيه، تستخدم في ضرب أهداف جوية وأهداف بحرية بنفس الكفاءة والفعالية. وهي صواريخ صواريخ مضادة للسفن. ويحمل كلّ طراد او مدمّرة ١١٢ من هذه الصواريخ، بالإضافة الى انّ جميع هذه القطع البحرية قد تمّ تزويدها بقاذفات صواريخ عمودية، مما يجعل كلّ قطعه قادرة على إطلاق ٣٢ صاروخاً دفعة واحدة.

وهذا يعني انّ سلاح البحرية الصيني، حسب المجلة الأميركية، قد أصبح أول سلاح بحرية في العالم يتسلح بهذا الطراز الثقيل من الصواريخ، ونعني هنا صواريخ دونغ فينغ ٢٦ ومداه اربعة آلاف كيلومتر، وصاروخ دونغ فينغ ومداه الف وسبعمائة كيلومتر.

وبالتالي فانّ الصين الشعبية قد أصبحت دولة قادرة، ليس فقط على حماية مصالحها الاقتصادية في العالم، بل على وضع حدّ لعربدة الأساطيل الأميركية في بحار العالم، خاصة في المحيط الهادئ وبحار الصين واليابان والفلبين والبحر الأصفر.

4

ـ أما إذا أضفنا قوة سلاح البحرية الروسيه الى تلك الصينيه،. فاذا ما دقق المرء في قدرات القطع البحرية الروسية، وأخذ الطراد «موسكو» كمثال وألقى نظرة على تسليحه فانّ بإمكان المرء ان يصل بسرعة الى استنتاج انّ هذه الجوهرة الروسية لا يوجد لها مثيل في العالم، خاصة بعد خضوع هذا الطراد لعمليات تحديث وإعادة تجهيز واسعة النطاق، استمرّت من سنة ٢٠١٨ حتى قبل أيام معدودة، حيث انطلق لممارسة أعماله القتالية من جديد. علماً انّ هذا الطراد الأسطورة كان، قبل الخضوع لعمليات التحديث، قد زار كلاً من: البرتغال وكوبا ونيكاراغوا وفنزويلا.

ولا داعي بطبيعة الحال، للتوسع أكثر، في تعداد القطع البحرية، التابعه للأساطيل البحرية الروسية، في بحر الشمال والمحيط المتجمّد الشمالي، والبحر المتوسط والبحر الأسود والمحيط الهادئ، ويكفي ذكر الطراد الصاروخي النووي «بطرس الاكبر»، وهو أكبر سفينة غير نووية في العالم، لنرى التأثيرات الهائلة، لتكامل القدرات البحرية الروسية مع تلك الصينية، واضعين في عين الاعتبار احتمال نجاح الجهود الروسية، في إنهاء الخلاف الحدودي الصيني الهندي، خاصة بعد نجاح وزير الدفاع الروسي في عقد اجتماع بين وزير الدفاع الصيني ووزير الدفاع الهندي، على هامش مؤتمر شانغهاي في موسكو، وما قد ينتج عنه مع تطبيع العلاقات بين البلدين، وافتكاك الهند من بين أنياب الوحش الأميركي، وضمّ قدراتها الى قدرات الصين وروسيا وإيران، التي تسعى إلى اقامة نظام تعاون دولي شامل يحلّ محلّ نظام الهيمنة الأميركي الأحادي.

5 ـ أما إذا انتقلنا الى إيران وقدراتها الدفاعية والهجومية فلا بدّ من التذكير بالموضوع الذي نشره الكاتب الأميركي، ميخائيل پيلار ، في مجلة «ذي ناشيونال انتريست» بتاريخ ٧/١٢/٢٠١٩، حول قيام إيران بتحديث كافة مدمّراتها وطراداتها، وتزويدها بأجهزة رادار قادرة على كشف الأجسام المعادية، وعلى إخفاء القطع البحرية الإيرانية عن أعين الرادارات المعادية، وتزويدها جميعاً بصوامع إطلاق صواريخ عمودية لتصبح بذلك قادرة على إطلاق رشقات صاروخية، تتكوّن كلّ رشقة من ٣٢ صاروخاً، الأمر الذي يجعل القدرة النارية، لسلاح البحرية الايراني، عالية جداً.

وهذا يعني انّ الأساطيل الإيرانية قد أصبحت قادرة على الدفاع عن مصالح إيران الحيوية، ليس فقط في محيط إيران، ولكن في مناطق بعيدة أيضاً. وما قيام إيران بإرسال ناقلات النفط الإيرانية، محمّلة بالنفط، الى فنزويلا بحماية من بحريتها، إلا دليل ساطع على التعاظم الهائل الذي شهده هذا الصنف من صنوف الأسلحة الإيرانية.

من هنا، ومن منطلقات الأدلة المادية الملموسة، فإنّ هذا الهجوم الديبلوماسي العسكري الفرنسي، المترافق بغطاء عسكري وديبلوماسي أميركي، كانت ذروته تصريحات وزير الخارجية الأميركي، مايك بومبيو، التي أعلن فيها عن تنسيق أميركي فرنسي وثيق، في ما يتعلق بالتحرك الخاص بلبنان، قبل أيام. إنما هي تحركات يقودها نفس المايسترو، الذي أوعز لهذه المجموعة من العازفين، بالهجوم على لبنان، بدءاً بتفجير الميناء مروراً بتحريك الأساطيل البحرية، وصولاً الى رحلات ماكرون المكوكية الى لبنان. وهي حزمة تحركات تهدف، حسب الذين خططوا لتفجير الوضع اللبناني، في وجه حلف المقاومة وكلاً من روسيا والصين، إلى حماية لبنان من السيطرة الكاملة لحزب الله عليه حسب زعمهم، خاصة أنّ عملاء واشنطن و«إسرائيل «في لبنان لم يتمكّنوا من تنفيذ مهام التخريب التي أوكلت لهم أميركياً. وهو ما دفع المبعوث الأميركي الى لبنان، ديفيد شينكر، الى توبيخهم بشكل علني تقريباً، خلال اجتماعه بهم في آخر زيارة له لبيروت.

اي انّ مخطط خلط الأوراق، الذي بدأ بتفجير الميناء، قد فشل أيضاً، وانّ ديبلوماسية المستعمر الفرنسي وسيده الأميركي في لبنان لن تغيّر في الواقع شيئاً. اذ انّ لبنان ليس بحاجة الى طائرات عسكرية فرنسية ينبعث منها دخان ملوّن وانما هو بحاجة الى استثمارات ملوّنة عملاقة، صينية روسية إيرانية. وبالنظر الى عجز ماكرون وسيده في واشنطن عن القيام بتنفيذ مثل هذه الاستثمارات المنتجة كما يؤكد محللون اقتصاديون مطلعون، فانّ ضجيج محركات طائرة الرئاسة الفرنسية، بعد إصلاحها إثر الحادث الذي تعرّضت له في مطار بيروت كما يزعمون، نقول انّ هذا الضجيج لوحده سوف لن يسفر عن أكثر من الدخان الأسود الذي تنفثه في أجواء لبنان، مسبّباً مزيداً من التلوّث وحجب الرؤية.

لبنان ليس بحاجة الى دروس لا في الأخلاق ولا في السياسة ولا في الاقتصاد النيوليبرالي ولا هو بحاجة لمصمّم أزياء اقتصادية، قادم من باريس، لإعادة تصميم النظام الرأسمالي اللبناني، بما يتماشى مع شروط المحافظين الجدد، وما يعنيه ذلك من إعادة إنتاج للنظام اللبناني الذي أهلك البلاد والعباد، وبشكل يجعل نتائج هذا التحرك مخيّبة لآمال الطبقات المحدودة الدخل، على المدى القصير، وسحقها نهائياً على المدى المتوسط والطويل، وذلك من خلال بيع لأصول الدولة اللبنانية، ايّ الخصخصة، وتعميق الفقر والعوز لدى قطاعات واسعة من الشعب اللبناني وتكريس نظام الاقتصاد الريعي، الذي ساد لبنان على مدى الثلاثين عاماً الماضية، ولكن بثوب جديد من تصميم مصمّم الأزياء الاقتصادية، خريج جامعة روتشيلد للتدمير المالي والاقتصادي، الرئيس الفرنسي ماكرون.

لبنان بحاجة الى رجال «تنكش» الأرض ولا تسرقها. لبنان بحاجة الى تطبيق خطة اقتصادية مقاومة كتلك التي اقترحها سماحة السيد حسن نصر الله. لبنان بحاجة الى تطبيق خطة اقتصاد مقاوم ومنتج، كالاقتصاد الإيراني والاقتصاد الكوبي، وليس لاقتصاد من هُلام وفقاعات تظهر وتندثر دون ان يشعر بها المواطن. ايّ الاقتصاد المرابي، اقتصاد أسواق البورصة وما ينتج عنها من أرباح خيالية لا يراها المواطن ولا تعود عليه إلا بالضرر والمصائب.

لن يصلح الإطار الباريسي ما هو حاصل من فساد وتدمير في لبنان، وعلى كلّ الصعد، وإنما الرجال الرجال القادرون على إنقاذ هذا البلد العظيم من كبوته، تماماً كما أنقذوه من الخطر التكفيري الإرهابي قبل سنوات وكما حرّروه من الاحتلال الصهيوني سنة ٢٠٠٠ وحموا هذا التحرير سنة ٢٠٠٦.

نحن بحاجة لهم ولأمثالهم وليس لمصمّم الأزياء ايف سان لوران…!

وهم الذين سيكملون المشوار وينقذون البلد بكلّ تأكيد.

هم يمنحون الآخرين الآن فترة سماح بانتظار ان يتبيّن الخيط الأبيض من الخيط الأسود.

والصبر مفتاح الفرج.

بعدنا طيّبين قولوا الله…

An open letter from an Arab Priest to his holiness Pope Francis

Source

Wednesday, 08 July 2020

Your Holiness,

In the Open Letter I addressed to you from Damascus on March 13, 2020, I asked you this question:

“Do you still believe, until today, in the survival of Jesus Christ in the Arab World?”

Today, at the dawn of July 8, 2020, I see it my duty, as an Arab Catholic Priest, to ask you another, far more dangerous, question:

“Can you deny, as the supreme spiritual leader of the Church, that this specific Church has been,effectively, the single main cause of the gradual, profound, and general,excising of Christianity on the scope of the world, starting from the West—at whose headis, as usual, the United States of America—because of its unacceptable sliding into and collusion with the slime of politics and finance since the time of Emperor Constantine until today?”

Nonetheless, Jesus Christ has always been, and will forever be, unique in His beauty, truthfulness, love, and magnetism.

Your Holiness,

At the end of a text that I wrote on April 5, 2020, entitled: “An answer to a friend in the West,” I asked this question:”

In a week, we shall celebrate the resurrection of Jesus!

I wonder: When shall we celebrate the ‘resurrection’ of His Church?” 

As we shall, in three days, celebrate the Feast of the great Syrian Saints, Peter and Paul, I allow myself to call upon you, anew, to visit Syria.

Rest assured, though, that you will not have to kiss the hands of some rich people, nor the feet of some African Chiefs, but, very simply, a handful of Syria’s holy earth… I offer to you on a wonderful piece of Damascene Broquart cloth, while I am standing proudly near our noble President.

Your Holiness,

Damascus awaits you.

Perchance this would be the dawn of the hoped-for ‘resurrection’ of the Church.

Fr Elias Zahlaoui,

Damascus, July 8 2020

Related Videos

Race, Economy and Viruses

Source

June 28, 2020

By Jimmy Moglia for the Saker Blog

Whatever busies the mind without corrupting it has at least this use, that it rescues the day from idleness, and he that is never idle will not often be vicious.

The previous unnecessary remark is intended as a pre-emptive application for absolution from the reader whose views expressed hereafter may not mirror his. We live in explosive times and some believe that diseases desperate grown should by desperate measures be relieved or not at all. Furthermore, historically, some of the deadliest conflicts centered on metaphysical disputes. And some of the current arguments may border, if not with metaphysics, at least with what is invisible to most of us.

An alleged pandemic affects, has affected and/or may continue to affect the world, from the most populous and largest countries to the remotest and tiniest, such as, for example, the Faroer Islands or St. Helena.

Not an exaggeration. A few weeks ago a plane flew from England to St. Helena, to drop a load of masks and swabs for her 4000 inhabitants. Who may be somewhat perplexed at how and when a virus (many millions of which are needed to make up an inch) could purposely drift or float or fly and reach unaided a faraway island in the middle of the South Atlantic. A proposition that, if not endorsed by theological medicine, would appear extravagantly fanciful and ineffably imaginative.

Overall I think we are living with a curious phenomenon that our calmer reason may style a pan-sociological experiment, involving a perplexing physical virus, now suddenly coexistent with a sudden, endemic and equally perplexing social virus, namely racism. But on this later.

I do not intend to tire the reader with disputes about the validity, let alone the accuracy of statistics on infections, deaths and survivors of the coronavirus. Suffice to say that the collective perception would probably change, if the grim and harsh statistics of death included the average age of the deceased, namely 80 years.

To be clear, this number only reflects what I could obtain from official statistics related to a country I followed (Italy). Though there is plausibly reliable and apparently consistent similar information regarding other countries.

It is uncontested, however, that mass information outlets have, since the inception of the pandemic, aimed heavily at inducing panic, hysteria and consternation among their audience.

Italy was the first country in the headlines as the European target of the virus, with the highest number of related deaths. In the city of Bergamo military trucks were repeatedly shown on TV carrying coffins away from the hospital as the local facilities were overwhelmed.

It now appears that the main hospital of the city became the collection point of all dead bodies from the surrounding districts, that funeral homes shut down due to panic, and that the hospital had minimal facilities for cremation. Added to this, the famous ventilators, early deemed instruments of salvation, actually contributed to the demise of the patient, for reasons that the interested reader can easily find online.

And one of the most eminent among the eminent specialists in infectious diseases said recently that the statistics provided by the media were/are “like the numbers of a lottery” and that, due to expediency or collective mesmerism many hospital deaths were summarily attributed to the coronavirus. A point broadly confirmed by the director of the main hospital of Milan.

All this proves that seemingly unquestionable medical authority can drive millions into the pale of questionable beliefs. And it is patently undeniable that medicine has since long contracted a dubious and unorthodox alliance with power, implicitly accepting the idolatrous monotheism of the market as the only allowed religion.

Not an exaggeration. Even the Pope has adopted the language of immunization and metaphysical vaccination. Here is one of his very recent tweets,

“The Lord knows that evil and sins are not our identity; they are illnesses, infectious diseases and He comes to cure them with the Eucharist, which contains antibodies for our memory sick of negativity. With Jesus we can immunize ourselves from sadness.”

Sometimes words say more than they appear to mean. Here they represent the latest of several instances, showing how the Church has surrendered to the new scientific and medical theology. A theology that, in the times of the coronavirus, has become a new doctrine, both therapeutically and politically correct.

Considering also that the Pope, against the will of the Episcopal Conference, has quietly accepted, in the name of the emergency, all the restrictive measures concerning the Catholic Mass and most other rites.

He says that Catholics must ‘obey’ the government – which, in the instance, means the suspension of the freedom of religion. There is/was online the video of a rebellious priest in Italy celebrating the Mass, with irrupting policemen halting the ceremony and taking him away.

Furthermore, ‘obeying’ is a revealing word, showing how the Church has essentially bowed to the relativistic nihilism of the victorious market civilization.

Bergoglio metabolizes the lexicon of medical theology, the syntax of a therapeutically correct world and the language of a new scientific theology. Today Capital accepts Christianity only if it becomes a religion of individual concern, a privatized cult practiced in one’s own private sphere. Or it is tolerated in the public domain if it renounces transcendence and becomes a simple secular agency for the administration of the world order.

Bergoglio’s words are interesting, for they reveal the metabolization by the Church of a new and therapeutically correct language. Sins become diseases and infections, the Eucharist becomes the equivalent of rescuing antibodies, and Jesus Christ becomes the great vaccine – a transfiguration of dubious taste, converting the Christian into a medical discourse.

A medical discourse supported, sponsored and promoted by power. But power does not believe the fables it spreads and defends. For it owns the instruments of fear and denies those of knowledge through an infernal noise inescapable by its victims and even by its perpetrators.

That the coronavirus has raised the prospect of a pecuniary bonanza for a few and of calamities for many others needs no demonstration. The few are those who will gain and are already gaining from the prospect of one or more coronavirus vaccines. The others are those, for example, who lost a job, a business or their livelihood.

Still, the fierce debates and confrontations among authorities in virology and related sciences may also prompt us to examine the very meaning of knowledge, somehow forgotten in the current disputes and diatribes among experts.

Knowledge is essentially the awareness of its boundaries. The phases of development in modern science reflect and correspond to the capability of questioning its limits. Whereas, during the primitive phases of human development man thought that magic explained the world, and that by explaining it he could control it.

The phenomenon is not new, though it appears in different disguises. Just think of the many officially approved and heavily promoted drugs, scientifically branded as salvific medicines and shown in proof but deadly poisons. The coronavirus pandemic has only raised the stakes to a new and higher level.

The sum of the preternaturally disturbing events that have accompanied the “pandemic” of the Covid/19, during this first half of 2020, must cause us to reflect on the origins, the unfolding and the end goal of this veritable “pandemonium.” In which, under the pretext of the physical health of man (that replaced the health of his mind and/or soul), we witnessed a real coup d’etat on a world scale, to establish an absolutist and totalitarian tyranny under therapeutic/eugenic disguises.

This coup attacks the very nature of man by limiting his freedom, which is his essential mark, and without which he ceases to be himself, as in Aristotle’s definition of a ‘rational and free creature.’ And by isolating him the coup renders man a-social, again quoting Aristotle’s words.

It represents the beginning of that New World Order that recently has been more openly spoken-of. For, with the compulsory delivery of vaccines and pandemic-monitoring APPs, the New World Order will remotely control, direct and dominate not only the public, but also the private life of humanity.

The 1968’s Cultural-Marxist upheaval had already revolutionized man’s mental interiority, especially the soul of the young, through drugs, psychedelic music and the Freudian unfettered freedom of passions. Yet they were phenomena still external to man, whom intelligence and free-will could save or preserve – at least those who did not buy into the tenets of the Frankfurt School.

The new world order, instead, wants to install into our body, brain and/or DNA sundry technological transmitters and markers that will force man to do what the Kalergian Owners of the World want him to do. All under the guise and objective of maintaining his bodily health.

The plan is diabolic and well planned. After all, already in 2012, Jacques Attali, hyper-Zionist and mentor of Manuel Macron of France said that, “A little pandemic will enable to install a World Government.” We now directly witness its progress, starting at the end of 2019 and especially with the beginning of 2020. Until a few months ago, nobody would have believed it.

From what I could gather, there are actually two competing factions in the rush to implement the Judaic-Masonic Globalist charter. One is the radical wing, trans-national and trans-religious. Names associated with the faction are Soros, Rothschild, Rockefeller, Gates, (the ‘Deep State’), and Pope Bergoglio (the ‘Deep Church’). This faction supports China, which is ultraliberal in economics and communist in politics.

The other faction is public, somewhat esoteric, political, national, parliamentary, democratic and moderate in a modern sense. It includes Trump, perhaps even Putin, and would support the North American nation, allied with Russia, in an anti-Chinese function.

Patently missing is a counter-revolutionary force, anti-Zionist and anti-masonic. This responsibility once fell on the Catholic hierarchy, now completely adrift, socially and theologically, after the second Vatican Council.

Ex US nuncio Cardinal Vigano’, – who represents the hub of the Catholic anti-Bergoglio opposition – recently wrote an open letter to Trump, from which I quote,

“In recent months we have been witnessing the formation of two opposing sides that I would call Biblical: the children of light and the children of darkness. The children of light constitute the most conspicuous part of humanity, while the children of darkness represent an absolute minority. And yet the former are the object of a sort of discrimination, which places them in a situation of moral inferiority with respect to their adversaries, who often hold strategic positions in government, in politics, in the economy and in the media. In an apparently inexplicable way, the good are held hostage by the wicked and by those who help them either out of self-interest or fearfulness.

These two sides, which have a Biblical nature, follow the clear separation between the offspring of the Woman and the offspring of the Serpent. On the one hand there are those who, although they have a thousand defects and weaknesses, are motivated by the desire to do good, to be honest, to raise a family, to engage in work, to give prosperity to their homeland, to help the needy, and, in obedience to the Law of God, to merit the Kingdom of Heaven. On the other hand, there are those who serve themselves, who do not hold any moral principles, who want to demolish the family and the nation, exploit workers to make themselves unduly wealthy, foment internal divisions and wars, and accumulate power and money: for them the fallacious illusion of temporal well-being will one day – if they do not repent – yield to the terrible fate that awaits them, far from God, in eternal damnation.

In society, Mr. President, these two opposing realities co-exist as eternal enemies, just as God and Satan are eternal enemies. And it appears that the children of darkness – whom we may easily identify with the deep state which you wisely oppose and which is fiercely waging war against you in these days – have decided to show their cards, so to speak, by now revealing their plans. They seem to be so certain of having already everything under control that they have laid aside the circumspection that until now had at least partially concealed their true intentions. The investigations already under way will reveal the true responsibility of those who managed the Covid emergency not only in the area of health care but also in politics, the economy, and the media. We will probably find that in this colossal operation of social engineering there are people who have decided the fate of humanity, arrogating to themselves the right to act against the will of citizens and their representatives in the governments of nations.

We will also discover that the riots in these days were provoked by those who, seeing that the virus is inevitably fading and that the social alarm of the pandemic is waning, necessarily have had to provoke civil disturbances, because they would be followed by repression, which, although legitimate, could be condemned as an unjustified aggression against the population. The same thing is also happening in Europe, in perfect synchrony.

…. it will not be surprising if, in a few months, we learn once again that hidden behind these acts of vandalism and violence there are those who hope to profit from the dissolution of the social order so as to build a world without freedom.

… Although it may seem disconcerting, the opposing alignments I have described are also found in religious circles. There are faithful Shepherds who care for the flock of Christ, but there are also mercenary infidels who seek to scatter the flock and hand the sheep over to be devoured by ravenous wolves. It is not surprising that these mercenaries are allies of the children of darkness and hate the children of light: just as there is a deep state, there is also a deep church that betrays its duties and forswears its proper commitments before God.”

end of quote

The reader may guess who are the “children of darkness holding strategic positions in government, in politics, in the economy and in the media,” the “offspring of the serpent,” the “ravenous wolves,” “those who serve themselves and do not hold any moral principles who have decided the fate of humanity,” and “those who hope to profit from the dissolution of the social order so as to build a world without freedom.”

The historian who will review with an impartial eye the events of Winter, Spring and Summer of 2020, may wonder in awe at the almost seamless transition and smooth blending between the viral pandemic – possibly questionable, at least in the eye of some – and the definitely questionable pandemic of destruction prompted by alleged racism. Even a Cardinal of the Catholic opposition sees a connection between the two phenomena. Which may prompt a reflection by those who brand interpretations of events not sanctioned by authorities as conspiracy theories or phantoms in the clouds.

The coronavirus has equally produced a worldwide economic pandemic, caused by measures that placed entire nations under house arrest. It has been (is) a global social earthquake aimed at destroying the middle class. For even in this we may note a continuity with the dominant lines of globalization, now advanced and accelerated thanks to the coronavirus.

We are dealing with an authoritarian turn that guarantees to the dominant class dominion without consent. A move that also accelerates the fusion of the shrinking middle class with the proletariat, into one amorphous social body, with limited rights and limited options for redress.

But even in these conditions, the signs of solicitude and of a struggle to escape are never completely absent. This new social body, however timidly and tentatively, is becoming aware of the global trick it has been the victim of – given also the hyperbolic inequality, the billionaires who idly prosper in the eye of wealth and the millions who struggle with distress in the elusive search for a decent life, or at least for some degree of economic safety.

This awareness would or could turn into a proper class struggle against the novel therapeutic and authoritarian capitalism – a capitalism that uses the coronavirus to create a new political model based on unquestionable and repressive authority.

The owners of the world are not exempt of fear. Fear produces vigilance and vigilance prudence. For revolts and revolutions are like a snow-ball on a deep slope. It is difficult to get it started, but when it does it cannot any longer be controlled.

To prevent being victims of an avalanche, the owners of the world have started and re-directed it. The controllers of the discourse, the administrators of the superstructures and the managers of consensus have launched and resorted to the well-tested, ever-ready and useful issue of racism.

And here the paradoxes pile on top of each other. The new ’anti-racists’ are the same that, as of yesterday, were the most racists (capitalist-wise) ever since man began to buy, sell and exploit.

And here is another paradox. This is what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – a US Congress representative and by ethnicity a natural member of the revolting minority – wrote in a recent tweet: “It’s critical that governors keep restrictions on businesses until after the November election, because the economic recovery will help re-elect Trump. Some closures or job losses are a small price to pay to be free from his presidency.”

“A small price to pay?” BS is a more decent rather than a less but more spontaneous response. It shows how those who most vocally claim that “black lives matter” couldn’t give a damn about the actual lives of blacks (and, by inference, of all the people that don’t count).

The Ocasio-Cortez(es) of this world are the voice of those who, overseas, do not hesitate to starve entire peoples to change regimes they don’t like. Power does not believe the fables it spreads and defends. For it owns the instruments of fear and denies those of knowledge via censorship applied to all popular means of communication. Indeed, the tweet fully exposes the gears of the media trick-machine and the undeclared intentions on which the pandemic narratives were built.

But the trick is/was useful and effective. Move the target of the struggle from the real problem – caused by the economic pandemic and by sanitary capitalism – to the problem of racism. Get the blacks to hate the white, particularly the less affluent or poor, so as to convert the class into a phony race struggle. In the end and in the current circumstances, racism is a permanent alibi for mass distraction from the class struggle.

Besides, most of us also would agree that racism is a convenient label for hiding true, serious problems left untouched and unspoken. Nor I intend to task any further the reader’s patience. But just to give some perspective and using the most recently available US statistics, in 2018 the number of crimes committed by black on whites were 547,948. The number of crimes by whites on blacks 59,778.

Can we explain all this concentrated defiance of logic, of numbers and of common sense? Probably not. For ours is the age of endless growth and triumphant turbo-capitalism. And though endless growth is physically impossible, the owners of the world disagree. Which means that turbo-capitalism represents the metaphysics of limitlessness, the idolatrous monotheism of the market, and the theology of the market economy as the only allowed religion.

But this extreme capitalism, unlike its previous externations, does not need stability. In order to survive and grow it needs rather a state of continuous crisis. Which, as it burns a bit of wealth to fuel the engine of speculation, it also prevents the coalescence of social forces to fight against the massacres of rights, of wages and of the future.

As of now, if there is a light at the end of the tunnel, I’d say it’s a train coming towards us. For we are still far away from learning to realign those elements in our human action that are most difficult to align: goodness without universal toleration, courage without fanaticism, intelligence without apathy, and hope without blindness.

Understanding why they lie and why they get away with it

In lieu of an normal introduction: the eternally evolving BDA

THE SAKER • FEBRUARY 13, 2020 •

Over 100 US service members have been diagnosed with mild traumatic brain injuries in the wake of the January 8 Iranian missile attack on the al Asad military base in Iraq, according to a US official with knowledge of the latest information?

On his website, Colonel Cassad offered this, shall we say, “evolution” of the truth as reported by the United States:

X stands for “surviving casualties”

Y stands for “dead”

1. X = 0, Y = 0
2. X = 11, Y = 0
3. X = 34, Y = 0
4. X = 50, Y = 0
5. X = 64, Y = 0
6. X=100+?, Y = 0
7. X> 200, Y> 80?

(that last line is, obviously, hypothetical, but at the time of writing, we are already up to 109 casualties!)

Notice that while the number of surviving wounded steadily goes up, there is no corresponding increase in the number of dead. All we have are “aircraft crashes” (all, we are told, accidental). Ask any military specialist (or military historian) and you will be told that this kind of “evolution” is exceedingly unlikely (see here for one discussion). Simply put – these kinds of numbers are pretty obviously impossible, which means that from the moment the Idiot-in-Chief tweeted “so far so good”, the US was already lying:

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

All is well! Missiles launched from Iran at two military bases located in Iraq. Assessment of casualties & damages taking place now. So far, so good! We have the most powerful and well equipped military anywhere in the world, by far! I will be making a statement tomorrow morning.

761K

6:45 AM – Jan 8, 2020

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307K people are talking about this

Is there really anybody out there who will deny that the US government lies pretty much about everything and anything?. And it’s not just the Executive Branch, Congress lies possibly even more (both parties, of course). In fact, I would argue that lying is both necessary AND expected from any US politician. When somebody like Tulsi Gabbard or Ron Paul don’t abide by this rule, the media immediately dismisses them as “Putin agents” or something equally insipid.

The truth is that lies have become the norm of the western political discourse.

That is bad enough by itself. But there is worse.

The worst is not that western politicians lie, the worst is that almost nobody cares.

That is really scary.

Why?

Because in a society which expects everybody to lie, facts simply don’t matter any more.

So that is the key question: do we care or don’t we?

Well, some clearly still care. Or we would not have Howard Zinn’s books, or Oliver Stone’s movies as best sellers. Neither would we have a vibrant 9/11 Truth movement. You want more evidence? Sure! How about all the folks who are willing to go into exile (or to jail!) to uphold the rights of historians to freely investigate the history of WWII? How about Ed Snowden, Julian Assange or Bradley Manning? How about the millions of people in the West who took to the streets to protest the various GWOT wars? No, there clearly are a lot of people who care.

The problem is that their impact is minimal, and that is what I want to look into today.

Have facts and truth become redundant?

I doubt that there are many reading these lines who don’t already know for a fact that Kennedy was not killed by one “lone gunman”. Likewise, we all know the truth about the “Gulf of Tonkin” incident. Then there are those who realize that something about the Pearl Harbor attack stinks to high heaven. Some even remember the USS Liberty. Most specialists know about GLADIO. And I could go on and on. The fact is that most of the worst lies of the 20th century have been debunked beyond reasonable doubt, really.

Chris Hedges really nailed it when he spoke of an “Empire of Illusions“. He names the following types of illusions: the illusion of Literacy, the illusion of Love, the illusion of Wisdom, the illusion of Happiness and the illusion of America. The book is most interesting, and I highly recommend it. But I think that there is one crucial aspect of the Empire being an “Empire of Illusions” and that is the illusion of Reality. What do I mean by that?

I mean the following: most people are aware that there is a “reality” of some kind out there. Of course, many people are aware of how difficult it can be to ascertain what the “real reality” really is, thus they prefer to cautiously state that getting to the truth is a very difficult endeavor. These are the folks who know enough to know that they really don’t know much. But then there are also those who misinterpret this caution as to mean that there really is no such thing as reality at all and all there is, is the sum of our subjective perception thereof (of reality that is). Pretty soon we have slipped from:

• Reality is often very difficult to establish

to

• Reality is impossible to establish

to

• Reality does not really exist at all (or, if it does, it really doesn’t matter)

Of course, most people won’t directly declare that reality does not exist – they just act as if it didn’t.

It all began centuries ago by a quite formidable indifference to Truth on the part of the leaders of the Papacy. These folks were all about power, so if religion could give it to them, then religion was good, but when religion placed limits on what the Latins could or could not do (say like during the famous “Valladolid debate“), then suddenly religion became a hindrance which had to be “reformed”. And, indeed, once the original Christianity was “reformed” (be it by the Reform or the Counter-Reformation) all hell broke lose for most of mankind and the Age of Imperialism was fully ushered in and the ancient motto “exitus acta probat” became the de facto measure of morality.

Then came the first blow of the scientific revolution of the late Renaissance which left the Papacy with very little credibility left.

The next blow came during WWII when the Papacy saw its very last hurrah come and go, pretty quickly, in fact (it lasted just as long as Hitler’s “1000 year Reich” did: 12 years). By the end of the war, western Christianity was left in shambles and, even worse was the fact that none of the victors of WWII (Reformed Anglos, Atheist Soviets, Jews – secular and not, etc.) had any warm feelings left for the Christianity (truth be told, neither did Hitler or Mussolini). At this point the Papacy decided to commit suicide and organized the Vatican II Council, which must be the most massive surrender of values previously held for sacred in history. This ill-advised attempt to show “Roman Catholicism with a human face” resulted in a total failure. Those who hated the Papacy were unimpressed did not like it any more. As for the confused rank and file “Roman Catholics” (whom I refer to as “Latins”), they were were left with the following conundrum: if the Pope is infallible (which he is as per the First Vatican Council of 1868), how can he so clearly contradict the teachings of his own Church (not to mention the teachings of his putatively infallible predecessors!)? Some declared that the Pope was a heretic, others simply declared that the “Holy See” was unoccupied (“sedevacantism“), but most simply gave up in total disgust (sex scandals did not help!) and simply stopped asking “what is the truth”?

When a Church which had declared itself “The Church” (all in CAPS, and at the exclusion of all others) for 910 years (almost a millennium!) suddenly acts as if all religions were equally “true” (this is logically impossible, but never mind that) and when a once powerful “Holy Father” (and Vicar of Christ, no less!) becomes just another public figure somewhere between Kim Kardashian and Greta Thunberg, you know that something very big has taken place.

Something very bad too.

 

The truth is not only unwelcome, it does not even exist, right?!

Both world wars were the manifestation of an immense civilizational collapse. WWI saw the collapse of the traditional European monarchies and empires. WWII, and its absolutely unprecedented explosion of hatred (political, class, racial, linguistic, religious, etc.) saw Europe, once the center of our planet, being subjected to a monstrous (but also highly predictable) bloodbath which resulted in two non-European powers splitting the world into two spheres of influence (at least that was the plan). More interestingly, while nominally “Christian” rulers and countries could not openly advocate for mass terror, the “enlightened” secular folks had no such problems at all. Just read Trotsky’s brilliant, if clearly satanic, “Dictatorship versus Democracy” or Hitler’s 5th chapter in Mein Kampf (here in German if you can!).

Both Dostoevskii and Solzhenitsyn predicted what would inevitably happen to a world in which Nihilism prevails. Dostoevskii very simply summarized it all when he wrote (in the Karamazov Brothers) “if there is no God, then everything is allowed“. The Nihilists have simply logically concluded that if there is no God, and everything is allowed, then nothing really exists, most certainly not any “real” (objective) reality. Even the very notions of “good” and “evil” are absolutely meaningless absent an absolute reference system.

Bertrand Russel (and, apparently, also Voltaire) once brilliantly wrote that “God created Man in His image and Man returned Him the favor“. Amazing words, really! If we are not the creation of God, but God is our creation, that makes us very much God-like, does it not? And, as “gods” – don’t we deserve to define for ourselves what is “good” and what is “bad”? Of course we do! Once life/existence has no meaning, how could concepts such as “good” or “evil”? And that is exactly what we have done, especially our post-modern 21 century Nihilists!

Back to where we started – assessing the “so what?” defense

I have already mentioned many times the mind-blowing hypocrisy of the Dems, who all hate on Trump for his alleged “so what?” defense (which, by the way, is a mis-characterization – his defense was much more solid and logical), but have absolutely no problems with people like the Obamas or, even better, the Clintons next to whom Trump almost sounds like a paragon of honesty, integrity and an acute sense of decency. I mean, really, the Clintons made even violent mobsters (Italian or Jewish) look pure and innocent. And when they lie, this is absolutely no big deal. But when Trump lies, then he elicits the kind of blind, impotent, rage which in the Gospel is described by the words “weeping and gnashing of teeth“. Maybe that is what they refer to when they speak of a “Trump derangement syndrome” amongst US liberals?

The truth is simple: we all know that Trump lied. About the Iranian counter-strike and about many other things. We also know that Obama lied. And Baby-Bush too. And the Clinton and his no-sex cigars… And we remember “read my lips, no new taxes” just as well as we remember “We did not, I repeat, did not trade weapons or anything else [to Iran] for hostages, nor will we“. So yes, we remember.

We just don’t care anymore.

We have been completely desensitized not only to truth, but even to reality.

So what, right?

And the consequences are dire indeed!

Conclusion: life in a reality-free world

The fact that we, who live inside the Empire, live in a reality-free world has a huge impact upon the actions of our rulers. After all, if nobody really believes in, or cares about, reality, then why should our rulers bother with making reality any better, especially for us? It is much, much, simpler to simply present a “feelgood” message about how great “America” is (as in “We have the most powerful and well equipped military anywhere in the world, by far!“) and never mind that this most powerful military in the Galaxy could not even protect its own soldiers even though they knew exactly when and where the Iranian counter-strike would come.

Of course, with time, the entire edifice of lies built by US and EU politicians will come crashing down, either as a consequence of a military defeat impossible to hide, or from a major economic shock. This will be totally unexpected for those who choose to live in a reality-free world.

The Empire splits the Orthodox world – possible consequences

يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا لَا تَتَّخِذُوا الْيَهُودَ وَالنَّصَارَىٰ أَوْلِيَاءَ ۘ بَعْضُهُمْ أَوْلِيَاءُ بَعْضٍ ۚ وَمَن يَتَوَلَّهُم مِّنكُمْ فَإِنَّهُ مِنْهُمْ ۗ إِنَّ اللَّهَ لَا يَهْدِي الْقَوْمَ الظَّالِمِينَ ِِ ِA must see Video

 

The Saker

October 19, 2018

[This analysis was written for the Unz Review]

In previous articles about this topic I have tried to set the context and explain why most Orthodox Churches are still used as pawns in purely political machinations and how the most commentators who discuss these issues today are using words and concepts in a totally twisted, secular and non-Christian way (which is about as absurd as discussing medicine while using a vague, misunderstood and generally non-medical terminology). I have also written articles trying to explain how the concept of “Church” is completely misunderstood nowadays and how many Orthodox Churches today have lost their original Patristic mindset. Finally, I have tried to show the ancient spiritual roots of modern russophobia and how the AngloZionist Empire might try to save the Ukronazi regime in Kiev by triggering a religious crisis in the Ukraine. It is my hope that these articles will provide a useful context to evaluate and discuss the current crisis between the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Moscow Patriarchate.

My intention today is to look at the unfolding crisis from a more “modern” point of view and try to evaluate only what the political and social consequences of the latest developments might be in the short and mid term. I will begin by a short summary.

The current context: a summary

The Patriarchate of Constantinople has taken the official decision to:

1. Declare that the Patriarch of Constantinople has the right to unilaterally grant autocephaly (full independence) to any other Church with no consultations with any the other Orthodox Churches.
2. Cancel the decision by the Patriarch of Constantinople Dionysios IV in 1686 transferring the Kiev Metropolia (religious jurisdiction overseen by a Metropolite) to the Moscow Patriarchate (a decision which no Patriarch of Constantinople contested for three centuries!)
3. Lift the anathema pronounced against the “Patriarch” Filaret Denisenko by the Moscow Patriarchate (in spite of the fact that the only authority which can lift an anathema is the one which pronounced it in the first place)
4. Recognize as legitimate the so-called “Ukrainian Orthodox Church – Kiev Patriarchate” which it previously had declared as illegitimate and schismatic.
5. Grant actual grand full autocephaly to a future (and yet to be defined) “united Ukrainian Orthodox Church”

Most people naturally focus on this last element, but this might be a mistake, because while illegally granting autocephaly to a mix of nationalist pseudo-Churches is most definitely a bad decision, to act like some kind of “Orthodox Pope” and claim rights which only belong to the entire Church is truly a historical mistake. Not only that, but this mistake now forces every Orthodox Christian to either accept this as a fait accompli and submit to the megalomania of the wannabe Ortho-Pope of the Phanar, or to reject such unilateral and totally illegal action or to enter into open opposition. And this is not the first time such a situation has happened in the history of the Church. I will use an historical parallel to make this point.

The historical context:

The Church of Rome and the rest of the Christian world were already on a collision course for several centuries before the famous date of 1054 when Rome broke away from the Christian world. Whereas for centuries Rome had been the most steadfast bastion of resistance against innovations and heresies, the influence of the Franks in the Church of Rome eventually resulted (after numerous zig-zags on this topic) in a truly disastrous decision to add a single world (filioque – “and the son” in Latin) to the Symbol of Faith (the Credo in Latin). What made that decision even worse was the fact that the Pope of Rome also declared that he had the right to impose that addition upon all the other Christian Churches, with no conciliar discussion or approval. It is often said that the issue of the filioque is “obscure” and largely irrelevant, but that is just a reflection of the theological illiteracy of those making such statements as, in reality, the addition of the filioque completely overthrows the most crucial and important Trinitarian and Christological dogmas of Christianity. But what *is* true is that the attempt to unilaterally impose this heresy on the rest of the Christian world was at least as offensive and, really, as sacrilegious as the filioque itself because it undermined the very nature of the Church. Indeed, the Symbol of Faith defines the Church as “catholic” (Εἰς μίαν, Ἁγίαν, Καθολικὴν καὶ Ἀποστολικὴν Ἐκκλησίαν”) meaning not only “universal” but also “whole” or “all-inclusive”. In ecclesiological terms this “universality” is manifested in two crucial ways:

First, all Churches are equal, there is no Pope, no “historical see” granting any primacy just as all the Apostles of Christ and all Orthodox bishops are also equals; the Head of the Church is Christ Himself, and the Church is His Theadric Body filled with the Holy Spirit. Oh I know, to say that the Holy Spirit fills the Church is considered absolutely ridiculous in our 21^st century post-Christian world, but check out these words from the Book of Acts: “For it seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us” (Acts 15:28) which clearly show that the members of the Apostolic Council in Jerusalem clearly believed and proclaimed that their decisions were guided by the Holy Spirit. Anyone still believing that will immediately see why the Church needs no “vicar of Christ” or any “earthly representative” to act in Christ’s name during His absence. In fact, Christ Himself clearly told us “lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen” (Matt 28:20). If a Church needs a “vicar” – then Christ and the Holy Spirit are clearly not present in that Church. QED.

Second, crucial decisions, decisions which affect the entire Church, are only taken by a Council of the entire Church, not unilaterally by any one man or any one Church. These are really the basics of what could be called “traditional Christian ecclesiology 101” and the blatant violation of this key ecclesiological dogma by the Papacy in 1054 was as much a cause for the historical schism between East and West (really, between Rome and the rest of Christian world) as was the innovation of the filioque itself.

I hasten to add that while the Popes were the first ones to claim for themselves an authority only given to the full Church, they were not the only ones (by the way, this is a very good working definition of the term “Papacy”: the attribution to one man of all the characteristics belonging solely to the entire Church). In the early 20^th century the Orthodox Churches of Constantinople, Albania, Alexandria, Antioch, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Poland, and Romania got together and, under the direct influence of powerful Masonic lodges, decided to adopt the Gregorian Papal Calendar (named after the 16^th century Pope Gregory XIII). The year was 1923, when the entire Russian Orthodox Church was being literally crucified on the modern Golgotha of the Bolshevik regime, but that did not prevent these Churches from calling their meeting “pan Orthodox”. Neither did the fact that the Russian, Serbian, Georgian, Jerusalem Church and the Holy Mountain (aka “Mount Athos”) rejected this innovation stop them. As for the Papal Calendar itself, the innovators “piously” re-branded it as “improved Julian” and other such euphemism to conceal the real intention behind this.

Finally, even the fact that this decision also triggered a wave of divisions inside their own Churches was not cause for them to reconsider or, even less so, to repent. Professor C. Troitsky was absolutely correct when he wrote that “there is no doubt that future historians of the Orthodox Church will be forced to admit that the Congress of 1923 was the saddest event of Church life in the 20th century” (for more on this tragedy see here, here and here). Here again, one man, Ecumenical Patriarch Meletius IV (Metaxakis) tried to “play Pope” and his actions resulted in a massive upheaval which ripped through the entire Orthodox world.

More recently, the Patriarch of Constantinople tried, once again, to convene what he would want to be an Orthodox “Ecumenical Council” under his personal authority when in 2016 (yet another) “pan Orthodox” council was convened on the island of Crete which was attended by the Churches of Alexandria , Jerusalem , Serbia , Romania , Cyprus , Greece, Poland , Albania and of the Czech Lands and Slovakia. The Churches of Russia, Bulgaria, Georgia, and Antioch refused to attend (the US OCA – was not invited). Most observers agreed that the Moscow Patriarchate played a key role in undermining what was clearly to be a “robber” council which would have introduced major (and fully non-Orthodox) innovations. The Patriarch of Constantinople never forgave the Russians for torpedoing his planned “ecumenical” council.

Some might have noticed that a majority of local Churches did attend both the 1923 and the 2016 wannabe “pan Orthodox” councils. Such an observation might be very important in a Latin or Protestant context, but in the Orthodox context is is absolutely meaningless for the following reasons:

The theological context:

In the history of the Church there have been many “robber” councils (meaning illegitimate, false, councils) which were attended by a majority of bishops of the time, and even a majority of the Churches; in this article I mentioned the life of Saint Maximos the Confessor (which you can read in full here) as a perfect example of how one single person (not even a priest!) can defend true Christianity against what could appear at the time as the overwhelming number of bishops representing the entire Church. But, as always, these false bishops were eventually denounced and the Truth of Orthodoxy prevailed.

Likewise, at the False Union of Florence, when all the Greek delegates signed the union with the Latin heretics, and only one bishop refused to to do (Saint Mark of Ephesus), the Latin Pope declared in despair “and so we have accomplished nothing!”. He was absolutely correct – that union was rejected by the “Body” of the Church and the names of those apostates who signed it will remain in infamy forever. I could multiply the examples, but what is crucial here is to understand that majorities, large numbers or, even more so, the support of secular authorities are absolutely meaningless in Christian theology and in the history of the Church and that, with time, all the lapsed bishops who attended robber councils are always eventually denounced and the Orthodox truth always proclaimed once again. It is especially important to keep this in mind during times of persecution or of brutal interference by secular authorities because even when they *appear* to have won, their victory is always short-lived.

I would add that the Russian Orthodox Church is not just “one of the many” local Orthodox Churches. Not only is the Russian Orthodox Church by far the biggest Orthodox Church out there, but Moscow used to be the so-called “Third Rome”, something which gives the Moscow Patriarchate a lot of prestige and, therefore, influence. In secular terms of prestige and “street cred” the fact that the Russians did not participate in the 1923 and 2016 congresses is much bigger a blow to its organizers than if, say, the Romanians had boycotted it. This might not be important to God or for truly pious Christians, but I assure you that this is absolutely crucial for the wannabe “Eastern Pope” of the Phanar…

Who is really behind this latest attack on the Church?

So let’s begin by stating the obvious: for all his lofty titles (“His Most Divine All-Holiness the Archbishop of Constantinople, New Rome, and Ecumenical Patriarch“ no less!), the Patriarch of Constantinople (well, of the Phanar, really), is nothing but a puppet in the hands of the AngloZionist Empire. An ambitious and vain puppet for sure, but a puppet nonetheless. To imagine that the Uber-loser Poroshenko would convince him to pick a major fight with the Moscow Patriarchate is absolutely laughable and totally ridiculous. Some point out that the Patriarch of Constantinople is a Turkish civil servant. While technically true, this does not suggest that Erdogan is behind this move either: right now Erdogan badly needs Russia on so many levels that he gains nothing and risks losing a lot by alienating Moscow. No, the real initiator of this entire operation is the AngloZionist Empire and, of course, the Papacy (which has always tried to create an “Orthodoxerein Ukraine” from the “The Eastern Crusade” and “Northern Crusades” of Popes Innocent III and Gregory IX to the Nazi Ukraine of Bandera – see here for details).

Why would the Empire push for such a move? Here we can find a mix of petty and larger geostrategic reasons. First, the petty ones: they range from the usual impotent knee-jerk reflex to do something, anything, to hurt Russia to pleasing of the Ukronazi emigrés in the USA and Canada. The geostrategic ones range from trying to save the highly unpopular Ukronazi regime in Kiev to breaking up the Orthodox world thereby weakening Russian soft-power and influence. This type of “logic” shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the Orthodox world today. Here is why:

The typical level of religious education of Orthodox Christians is probably well represented by the famous Bell Curve: some are truly completely ignorant, most know a little, and a few know a lot. As long as things were reasonably peaceful, all these Orthodox Christians could go about their daily lives and not worry too much about the big picture. This is also true of many Orthodox Churches and bishops. Most folks like beautiful rites (singing, golden cupolas, beautiful architecture and historical places) mixed in with a little good old superstition (place a candle before a business meeting or playing the lottery) – such is human nature and, alas, most Orthodox Christians are no different, even if their calling is to be “not of this world”. But now this apparently peaceful picture has been severely disrupted by the actions of the Patriarch of Constantinople whose actions are in such blatant and severe violation of all the basic canons and traditions of the Church that they literally force each Orthodox Christian, especially bishops, to break their silence and take a position: am I with Moscow or with Constantinople?

Oh sure, initially many (most?) Orthodox Christians, including many bishops, will either try to look away or limit themselves to vapid expressions of “regret” mixed in with calls for “unity”. A good example of that kind of wishy washy lukewarm language can already be found here. But this kind of Pilate-like washing of hands (“ain’t my business” in modern parlance) is unsustainable, and here is why: in Orthodox ecclesiology you cannot build “broken Eucharistic triangles”. If A is not in communion with B, then C cannot be in communion with A and B at the same time. It’s really an “either or” binary choice. At least in theory (in reality, such “broken triangles” have existed, most recently between the former ROCA/ROCOR, the Serbian Church and the Moscow Patriarchate, but they are unsustainable, as events of the 2000-2007 years confirmed for the ROCA/ROCOR). Still, no doubt that some (many?) will try to remain in communion with both the Moscow Patriarchate and the Constantinople Patriarchate, but this will become harder and harder with every passing month. In some specific cases, such a decision will be truly dramatic, I think of the monasteries on the Holy Mountain in particular.

[Sidebar: on a more cynical level, I would note that the Patriarch of Constantinople has now opened a real Pandora’s box which now every separatist movement in an Orthodox country will be able to use to demand its own “autocephaly” which will threaten the unity of most Orthodox Churches out there. If all it takes to become “autocephalous” is to trigger some kind of nationalist uprising, then just imagine how many “Churches” will demand the same autocephaly as the Ukronazis are today! The fact that ethno-phyetism is a condemned heresy will clearly stop none of them. After all, if it is good enough for the “Ecumenical” Patriarch, it sure is good enough for any and all pseudo-Orthodox nationalists!]

What the AngloZionist Empire has done is to force each Orthodox Christian and each Orthodox Church to chose between siding with Moscow or Constantinople. This choice will have obvious spiritual consequences, which the Empire couldn’t give a damn about, but it will also profound political and social consequences which, I believe, the Empire entirely missed.

The Moscow Patriarchate vs the Patriarchate of Constantinople – a sociological and political analysis

Let me be clear here that I am not going to compare and contrast the Moscow Patriarchate (MP) and the Patriarchate of Constantinople (PC) from a spiritual, theological or even ecclesiological point of view here. Instead, I will compare and contrast them from a purely sociological and political point of view. The differences here are truly profound.

	Moscow Patriarchate	Patriarchate of Constantinople
Actual size	Very big	Small
Financial means	Very big	Small
Dependence on the support of the Empire and its various entities	Limited	Total
Relations with the Vatican	Limited, mostly due to very strongly anti-Papist sentiments in the people	Mutual support and de-facto alliance
Majority member’s outlook	Conservative	Modernist
Majority member’s level of support	Strong	Lukewarm
Majority member’s concern with Church rules/cannons/traditions	Medium and selective	Low
Internal dissent	Practically eliminated (ROCA)	Strong (Holy Mountain, Old Calendarists)

From the above table you can immediately see that the sole comparative ‘advantage’ of the PC is that is has the full support of the AngloZionist Empire and the Vatican. On all the other measures of power, the MP vastly “out-guns” the PC.

Now, inside the Ukronazi occupied Ukraine, that support of the Empire and the Vatican (via their Uniats) does indeed give a huge advantage to the PC and its Ukronazi pseudo-Orthodox “Churches”. And while Poroshenko has promised that no violence will be used against the MP parishes in the Ukraine, we all remember that he was the one who promised to stop the war against the Donbass, so why even pay attention to what he has to say.

US diplomats and analysts might be ignorant enough to believe Poroshenko’s promises, but if that is the case then they are failing to realize that Poroshensko has very little control over the hardcore Nazi mobs like the one we saw last Sunday in Kiev. The reality is very different: Poroshenko’s relationship to the hardcore Nazis in the Ukraine is roughly similar to the one the House of Saud has with the various al-Qaeda affiliates in Saudi Arabia: they try to both appease and control them, but they end up failing every time. The political agenda in the Ukraine is set by bona fideNazis, just as it is set in the KSA by the various al-Qaeda types. Poroshenko and MBS are just impotent dwarfs trying to ride on the shoulders of much more powerful devils.

Sadly, and as always, the ones most at risk right now are the simple faithful who will resist any attempts by the Ukronazi death-squads to seize their churches and expel their priests. I don’t expect a civil war to ensue, not in the usual sense of the world, but I do expect a lot of atrocities similar to what took place during the 2014 Odessa massacre when the Ukronazis burned people alive (and shot those trying to escape). Once these massacres begin, it will be very, very hard for the Empire to whitewash them or blame it all on “Russian interference”. But most crucially, as the (admittedly controversial) Christian writer Tertullian noticed as far back as the 2^nd century “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church”. You can be sure that the massacre of innocent Christians in the Ukraine will result in a strengthening of the Orthodox awareness, not only inside the Ukraine, but also in the rest of the world, especially among those who are currently “on the fence” so to speak, between the kind of conservative Orthodoxy proclaimed by the MP and the kind of lukewarm wishy washy “decaf” pseudo-Orthodoxy embodied by the Patriarchate of Constantinople. After all, it is one thing to change the Church Calendar or give hugs and kisses to Popes and quite another to bless Nazi death-squads to persecute Orthodox Christians.

To summarize I would say that by his actions, the Patriarch of Constantinople is now forcing the entire Orthodox world to make a choice between two very different kind of “Orthodoxies”. As for the Empire, it is committing a major mistake by creating a situation which will further polarize strongly, an already volatile political situation in the Ukraine.

There is, at least potentially, one more possible consequence from these developments which is almost never discussed: its impact inside the Moscow Patriarchate.

Possible impact of these developments inside the Moscow Patriarchate

Without going into details, I will just say that the Moscow Patriarchate is a very diverse entity in which rather different “currents” coexist. In Russian politics I often speak of Atlantic Integrationists and Eurasian Sovereignists. There is something vaguely similar inside the MP, but I would use different terms. One camp is what I would call the “pro-Western Ecumenists” and the other camp the “anti-Western Conservatives”. Ever since Putin came to power the pro-Western Ecumenists have been losing their influence, mostly due to the fact that the majority of the regular rank and file members of the MP are firmly behind the anti-Western Conservative movement (bishops, priests, theologians). The rabid hatred and fear of everything Russian by the West combined with the total support for anything anti-Russian (including Takfiris and Nazis) has had it’s impact here too, and very few people in Russia want the civilizational model of Conchita Wurst, John McCain or Pope Francis to influence the future of Russia. The word “ecumenism” has, like the word “democracy”, become a four letter word in Russia with a meaning roughly similar to “sellout” or “prostitution”. What is interesting is that many bishops of the Moscow Patriarchate who, in the past, were torn between the conservative pressure from their own flock and their own “ecumenical” and “democratic” inclinations (best embodied by the Patriarch of Constantinople) have now made a choice for the conservative model (beginning by Patriarch Kirill himself who, in the past, used to be quite favorable to the so-called “ecumenical dialog of love” with the Latins).

Now that the MP and the PC have broken the ties which previously united them, they are both free to pursue their natural inclinations, so to speak. The PC can become some kind of “Eastern Rite Papacy” and bask in an unhindered love fest with the Empire and the Vatican while the MP will now have almost no incentive whatsoever to pay attention to future offers of rapprochement by the Empire or the Vatican (these two always work hand in hand). For Russia, this is a very good development.

Make no mistake, what the Empire did in the Ukraine constitutes yet another profoundly evil and tragic blow against the long-suffering people of the Ukraine. In its ugliness and tragic consequences, it is quite comparable to the occupation of these lands by the Papacy via its Polish and Lithuanian agents. But God has the ability to turn even the worst horror into something which, in the end, will strengthen His Church.

Russia in general, and the Moscow Patriarchate specifically, are very much in a transition phase on many levels and we cannot overestimate the impact which the West’s hostility on all fronts, including spiritual ones, will have on the future consciousness of the Russian and Orthodox people. The 1990s were years of total confusion and ignorance, not only for Russia by the way, but the first decade of the new millennium has turned out to be a most painful, but also most needed, eye-opener for those who had naively trusted the notion that the West’s enemy was only Communism, not Russia as a civilizational model.

In their infinite ignorance and stupidity, the leaders of the Empire have always acted only in the immediate short term and they never bothered to think about the mid to long term effects of their actions. This is as true for Russia as it is for Iraq or the Balkans. When things eventually, and inevitably, go very wrong, they will be sincerely baffled and wonder how and why it all went wrong. In the end, as always, they will blame the “other guy”.

There is no doubt in my mind that the latest maneuver of the AngloZionist Empire in the Ukraine will yield some kind of feel-good and short term “victory” (“peremoga” in Ukrainian) which will be followed by a humiliating defeat (“zrada” in Ukrainian) which will have profound consequences for many decades to come and which will deeply reshape the current Orthodox world. In theory, these kinds of operations are supposed to implement the ancient principle of “divide and rule”, but in the modern world what they really do is to further unite the Russian people against the Empire and, God willing, will unite the Orthodox people against pseudo-Orthodox bishops.

Conclusion:

In this analysis I have had to describe a lot of, shall we say, “less than inspiring” realities about the Orthodox Church and I don’t want to give the impression that the Church of Christ is as clueless and impotent as all those denominations, which, over the centuries have fallen away from the Church. Yes, our times are difficult and tragic, but the Church has not lost her “salt”. So what I want to do in lieu of a personal conclusion is to quote one of the most enlightened and distinguished theologians of our time, Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos, who in his book “The Mind of the Orthodox Church” (which I consider one of the best books available in English about the Orthodox Church and a “must read” for anybody interested in Orthodox ecclesiology) wrote the following words:

Saint Maximos the Confessor says that, while Christians are divided into categories according to age and race, nationalities, languages, places and ways of life, studies and characteristics, and are “distinct from one another and vastly different, all being born into the Church and reborn and recreated through it in the Spirit” nevertheless “it bestows equally on all the gift of one divine form and designation, to be Christ’s and to bear His Name. And Saint Basil the Great, referring to the unity of the Church says characteristically: “The Church of Christ is one, even tough He is called upon from different places”. These passages, and especially the life of the Church, do away with every nationalistic tendency. It is not, of course, nations and homelands that are abolished, but nationalism, which is a heresy and a great danger to the Church of Christ.

Metropolitan Hierotheos is absolutely correct. Nationalism, which itself is a pure product of West European secularism, is one of the most dangerous threats facing the Church today. During the 20^th century it has already cost the lives of millions of pious and faithful Christians (having said that, this in no way implies that the kind of suicidal multiculturalism advocated by the degenerate leaders of the AngloZionist Empire today is any better!). And this is hardly a “Ukrainian” problem (the Moscow Patriarchate is also deeply infected by the deadly virus of nationalism). Nationalism and ethno-phyletism are hardly worse than such heresies as Iconoclasm or Monophysitism/Monothelitism were in the past and those were eventually defeated. Like all heresies, nationalism will never prevail against the “Church of the living God” which is the “the pillar and ground of the truth” (1 Tim 3:15) and while many may lapse, others never will.

In the meantime, the next couple of months will be absolutely crucial. Right now it appears to me that the majority of the Orthodox Churches will first try to remain neutral but will have to eventually side with the Moscow Patriarchate and against the actions of Patriarch Bartholomew. Ironically, the situation inside the USA will most likely be particularly chaotic as the various Orthodox jurisdictions in the USA have divided loyalties and are often split along conservative vs modernizing lines. The other place to keep a close eye on will be the monasteries on the Holy Mountain were I expect a major crisis and confrontation to erupt.

With the crisis in the Ukraine the heresy of nationalism has reached a new level of infamy and there will most certainly be a very strong reaction to it. The Empire clearly has no idea what kind of dynamic it has now set in motion.

The Saker

Pope Francis says ‘defenseless’ being killed in Holy Land after Gaza bloodshed #enoughisenough

Pope Francis says ‘defenseless’ being killed in Holy Land after Gaza bloodshed

Source: Vatican Media

Pope Francis, in his Easter address on Sunday, called for peace in the Holy Land two days after 15 Palestinians were killed by Israeli soldiers on the Israeli-Gaza border, saying the conflict there “does not spare the defenseless”.

The pope made his appeal in his “Urbi et Orbi” (to the city and the world) message from the central balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica to tens of thousands of people in the flower-bedecked square below where he earlier celebrated a Mass.

He also appealed for an end to the “carnage” in Syria, calling for humanitarian aid to be allowed to enter, and for peace in South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Francis appeared to refer directly to the Gaza violence last Friday, calling for “reconciliation for the Holy Land, also experiencing in these days the wounds of ongoing conflict that do not spare the defenseless.”

Israel’s defense minister has rejected calls for an inquiry into the killings by the military during a peaceful Palestinian demonstration.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Federica Mogherini, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, and other leaders have called for an independent investigation into the bloodshed.

The Pope also begged for peace for “the entire world, beginning with the beloved and long-suffering land of Syria, whose people are worn down by an apparently endless war.”

“This Easter, may the light of the risen Christ illumine the consciences of all political and military leaders, so that a swift end may be brought to the carnage in course … ” he said.

He spoke a day after the Assad regime command said it had regained most of the towns and villages in eastern Ghouta. Tens of thousands of people have now evacuated once-bustling towns in the suburbs east of the capital, which had nearly 2 million people before the start of the conflict and were major commercial and industrial hubs.

Francis called for international assistance for Venezuela, so that more people would not have to abandon their homeland because of the economic and political crisis.

He hoped the “fruits of dialogue” would advance peace and harmony on the Korean peninsula, where the two sides are set to hold their first summit in more than a decade on April 27, after North Korean leader Kim Jong Un pledged his commitment to denuclearisation.

Francis, celebrating his sixth Easter as Roman Catholic leader since his election in 2013, urged his listeners to work for an end to the “so many acts of injustice” in the world.

He prayed the power of Jesus’ message “bears fruits of hope and dignity where there are deprivation and exclusion, hunger and unemployment, where there are migrants and refugees – so often rejected by today’s culture of waste – and victims of the drug trade, human trafficking and contemporary forms of slavery”.

Trump Meets the New Leader of the Secular World, Pope Francis

by ROBERT FISK

Photo by thierry ehrmann | CC BY 2.0

After two days lecturing a collection of head-choppers, dictators, torturers and land thieves, Donald Trump at last met a good guy on Wednesday. Pope Francis didn’t ask for a $100bn (£77.2bn) arms deal for the Vatican. He wouldn’t go to war with Iran. He didn’t take the Sunni Muslim side against the Shia Muslim side in the next Middle East conflict. He didn’t talk about Palestinian “terror”. And he looked, most of the time, grim, unsmiling, even suspicious.

So he should have been. Trump’s broad, inane smile on confronting the Holy Father might have been more appropriate for the first of the Borgias, Alexander VI, whose 15th century womanising, corruption and enthusiasm for war would match Trump’s curriculum vitae rather well. But the poor man’s pope, who last year suggested that Trump wasn’t much of a Christian because he wanted to build walls, didn’t seem to be very happy to see the man who called him “disgraceful” for questioning his faith. “One offers peace through dialogue, the other security of arms,” one of Francis’ advisers said of the visit. Which pretty much sums it up.

It was indeed an odd sight to see the head of the Catholic church – whose anti-war, anti-corruption, anti-violence and pro-environment beliefs must surely now represent the secular world – greeting the present if very temporary leader of the secular world, whose policies are most surely not those of the Western people he would claim to represent. For more and more, the Good Old Pope is coming to represent what the Trumps and Mays will not say: that the West has a moral duty to end its wars in the Middle East, to stop selling weapons to the killers of the Middle East and to treat the people of the Middle East with justice and dignity.

No wonder the 29 minutes which the insane president and the sane pope spent together – Francis himself suggesting that they both keep away from the microphones – remain secret. Until, I suppose, Trump starts twittering again. They supposedly chatted about climate change, immigration, even arms sales. O fly upon the wall, speak up. And they talked, we are told, about “interreligious dialogue” and the need to protect Christians in the Middle East. They shared, we were finally informed, “a commitment to life, and freedom of speech and conscience” – which is more than most of Trump’s other hosts would have approved of these past two days.

Trump duly handed over a bunch of books by Martin Luther King which he hoped Pope Francis would enjoy – whether he had read them himself remains a mystery – and the Pope gave Trump some of his own writings on the environment. “Well, I’ll be reading them,” said the US President. A likely story.

When the Pope emerged from his private meeting with Trump, he was smiling in a relieved, almost charming way – like a man who had just left the dentist’s chair – and his joke with the veiled Melania about Croatian cookies, if not quite understood, showed that even a distressed pontiff can retain a sense of humor amid spiritual darkness. Trump thought it all “a great honor”. Not for the Pope, one imagines.

And there was the inevitable send-off from Trump, the kind he probably gave to all the greedy kings and criminals of the Middle East. “I won’t forget what you said,” he told Pope Francis as he left. O but he will, reader, he will.

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Robert Fisk writes for the Independent, where this column originally appeared. 

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Trump Visits Bethlehem Bearing Gifts to Child Killers

Finian Cunningham

May 20, 2017

US President Donald Trump makes his first overseas visit this weekend, beginning in the Middle East and continuing to Europe. His tour to the “holy land” is being presented with feel-good, messianic spin.

Trump touches down first in Saudi Arabia, then will go Israel and from there make a pilgrimage to Bethlehem in the Palestinian territories. After his stop at the reputed birthplace of Jesus, the American president will then fly to the Vatican, where he will be greeted by Roman Catholic Pope Francis. He will later meet NATO military leaders in Brussels.

resenting the president’s Middle East itinerary like a momentous religious event, Trump’s senior national security adviser General HR McMaster said:

“This trip is truly historic. No president has ever visited the homelands and holy sites of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths all on the same trip. And what President Trump is seeking is to unite peoples of all faiths around a common vision of peace, progress and prosperity.”

The White House, reported the Washington Post, described it as “an effort to unite three of the world’s leading religious faiths in the common cause of fighting terrorism, reining in Iran and unifying the world against intolerance.”

Hold it. Screech the brakes on this Hollywood-type script of Saint Donald saving the world. What utter claptrap.

The main purpose of his sojourn is to cut a record arms deal with Saudi Arabia and the other closely aligned Gulf Arab monarchies. While in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, addressing regional leaders about “world peace,” Trump is set to sign off weapons deals worth $350 billion. That’s more than double what his predecessor Barack Obama flogged to the Saudi rulers during his presidency.

According to Bloomberg, topping the list of US arms transfers are warships, helicopter gunships, anti-missile systems and tanks.

The THAAD anti-missile system, recently debuted in South Korea, is said to be among the inventory for the Saudis and other Gulf states to the tune of $10 billion. The crisis in Korea provides a convenient sales pitch to the Saudis. Maybe that’s partly why the Trump administration has dangerously provoked the tensions in Asia, precisely to push through their THAAD sales in the Middle East.

In addition to the weapons purchases, the Saudi rulers are also promising to invest $40 billion from their oil-rich sovereign wealth funds in American companies.

Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and personal adviser, has been instrumental in lining up the mega sales, in conjunction with the Saudi deputy Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman. The 30-year-old son of King Salman, who is also the defense minister, has been courting the Trump presidency ever since the election last November.

The Saudi prince, known as MBS by the Trump inner circle, is the chief strategist behind the Saudi war on Yemen since March 2015. That war is a blatant aggression on Yemen carried out by Saudi forces supplied by the US and Britain. Thousands of children have been killed in Saudi air strikes, using internationally banned cluster bombs in indiscriminate attacks on civilian centers.

Just days before Trump’s departure to the Middle East, Saudi air strikes reportedly killed 23 civilians, including six children, near the southern Yemeni city of Taiz.

Millions of other Yemeni children are dying from starvation and preventable diseases like cholera because of a naval blockade imposed on the country by Saudi and American forces. No doubt the new warships that Trump is lining up for Saudi Arabia will add to the “efficacy” of the genocide that is underway in Yemen.

With staggering cynicism, the Trump administration is “justifying” this ramped-up military support for Saudi Arabia as an effort to “fight terrorism” and to “counter Iranian meddling” in the region.

It is alleged that Iran is sponsoring militia in Yemen, Syria and Iraq and this is posing a threat to regional stability. Such claims are an insult to common intelligence, when we know that it is the American CIA and their Saudi client regime who have bankrolled and directed terrorism across the entire Middle East over many years in order to serve hegemonic interests of regime change.

But what is disturbing is just how braindead the Trump administration is. Trump is recklessly promoting the ridiculous fantasy that Saudi Arabia and its despotic terror-sponsoring clients are somehow the custodians of law and order. He is also pumping up the surreal Saudi narrative that Iran is largely responsible for the Middle East’s conflicts.

When the American president addresses Saudi and other Muslim leaders in Riyadh this weekend supposedly on the challenges of finding regional peace, two nations are banned from the gathering – Iran and Syria.

Saudi rulers have recently threatened Iran with fomenting a Syria-style proxy war inside Iran. The record arsenal of weapons that Trump is bringing to Saudi Arabia will only embolden its House of Saud tinpot dictators to pursue even more confrontation with Iran. Much of the small-arms weaponry that the Americans supply to Saudi Arabia already ends up in the hands of terror groups like Jabhat al Nusra and Daesh (so-called Islamic State).

There are perplexing signs that the US under Trump is ratcheting up military aggression toward Iran and its ally Syria. This week, US warplanes reportedly attacked Syrian armed forces and Iranian allies Hezbollah in southern Syria. It was the second such direct assault on Syria after Trump ordered Tomahawk missile strikes on the Shayrat airbase in April.

Syrian sources claim that the latest US air strike was carried out to protect militants being trained by American special forces inside Syrian territory. Those militants, known as Maghaweer al Thawra, are part of the Al Qaeda terror network, according to independent journalist Vanessa Beeley in email correspondence with this author.

Seems more than coincidence that the latest US operation was timed with Trump’s departure for Saudi Arabia. This is the kind of military action that the Saudis were constantly pushing the Obama administration to carry out. The strike on Iranian interests too will no doubt endear the new US commander-in-chief even more to his Saudi clients.

Trump’s messianic zeal to visit the Middle East – his first foreign destination being the dubious human rights “haven” Saudi Arabia – is all about flogging ever more deadly weapons to the already explosively-charged region. So desperate is Trump to pimp billions of dollars that he is willing to fuel war with Iran and perhaps Syria’s other ally, Russia, in the pursuit of lucre.

And to add further insult to injury, the whole tour of the “holy land” is being sold by the American government and media as some kind of benevolent religious duty to mankind and world peace.

The only “gifts” that Trump is bringing to Bethlehem and the region are ever more monstrous ways to murder children.

If Pope Francis had any integrity, or even news savvy, he should cancel Trump’s call at the Vatican, and explain exactly that child-killing regimes are not welcome.

Source: Sputnik

Donald of Arabia: Trump in the Middle East

by ROBERT FISK

Not since Ibn Batuta, travelled the Middle East in the 14th century has anyone set out with higher ambitions that Donald Trump. Batuta, a Moroccan Muslim traveller and scholar, had a few things in common with Trump. He reached what is now Saudi Arabia. He went to Jerusalem. He even had a keen eye for nubile ladies – there were a few wives, not to mention a Greek slave girl to be groped. But there the parallels end. For Ibn Batuta was sane.

Yet now we know that Trump thinks he’s touching the three monotheistic religions because he’s going to Riyadh, Jerusalem and then the Vatican (not quite in the Middle East but what’s a hundred miles for a guy like Trump). A few problems, of course. He can’t go to Holy Mecca because Christians are banned and the old king of Saudi Arabia represents a head-chopping Wahabi autocracy some of whose citizens have paid for – and fought alongside – the dreaded Isis which Trump thinks he is fighting.

Then when he goes to Jerusalem, he will meet Benjamin Netanyahu who hardly represents world Jewry and plans to go on thieving Arab lands in the West Bank for Jews, and Jews only, whatever Trump thinks. Then he’ll turn up at the Vatican to confront a man who – great guy though he may be – only represents Roman Catholics and doesn’t much like Trump anyway. Ibn Batuta was away from home for around a quarter of a century. Thank heavens Trump’s cutting that back to three days.

Of course, he’s no more going to be talking to “Islam” in Saudi Arabia than he is “Judaism” in Jerusalem. The Sunni Saudis are going to talk about crushing the “snake” of Shia Iran – and we must remember that Trump is the crackpot who shed crocodile tears over the Sunni babies killed in Syria last month but none for the Shia babies killed in Syria a few days later – and hope they can re-establish real relations between their execution-happy kingdom with the execution-happy US. Trump might just try to read UN rapporteur Ben Emmerson’s latest report on the imprisonment of human rights defenders and the torture of “terror” suspects in Saudi Arabia. No. Forget it.

Anyway, the king is no imam. Any more than Netanyahu is a rabbi. But Jerusalem will be a great gig because Trump will be able to ask Netanyahu for help against Isis without – presumably – realising that Israel bombs only the Syrian army and the Shia Hezbollah in Syria but has never – ever – bombed Isis in Syria. In fact, the Israelis have given medical aid to fighters from Jabhat al-Nusra, which is part of al-Qaeda which (maybe Trump has heard of this) attacked the United States on 9/11. So maybe the Vatican will be a relief.

Of course, Trump might have dropped by Lebanon to meet Patriarch Beshara Rai, a Christian prelate who at least lives in the Middle East and who might have been able to tell Trump a few home truths about Syria. Or, since Trump would be “honoured” to meet the Great Leader of North Korea, he might even have shocked the world by dropping by for a couple of hours with Bashar al-Assad. At least Ibn Batuta got to Damascus.

But no, Trump is searching for “friends and partners” to fight “terrorism” – something which has never, of course, been inflicted on Yemen by Saudi Arabia or on Lebanon and the Palestinians by Israel. Nor will it be mentioned by the boys and girls of CNN, ABC and all the US media titans who will – in the interest of promoting their importance by pretending that their President is not mad – grovellingly follow their crackpot President around the region with all the usual nonsense about “policies” and “key players” and “moderates” (as in “moderate Saudi Arabia”) and all the other fantastical creatures which they inject into their reports.

Oh yes, and Trump also wants to bring “peace” to the Holy Land. And so he will move from the king of head choppers to the thief of Palestinian lands and end up with the poor old Holy Father who is wisely giving the President only a few early-morning minutes before his weekly general audience. Since the Pope described Trump’s views as “not Christian” – an unsaintly thing for Pope Francis to say of a mentally ill man – and Trump called the Pope’s words “disgraceful”, this is not going to be a barrel of laughs.

But then again, the Pope shook the hand of the Sultan of Egypt only a week ago, the equally saintly Field Marshal President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, whose coup overthrew an elected president and who now “disappears” his enemies. Trump should be a piece of cake after that. Ibn Batuta, by the way, got as far as Beijing in his travels but was never “honoured” to meet the “smart cookie” who was ruling in Korea (which did actually exist in the 14th century).

But being a verbose chap, Ibn Batuta did record his homecoming in these words: “I have indeed … attained my desire in this world, which was to travel through the Earth, and I have attained this honour, which no ordinary person has attained.” That’s a real “honour” by the way. But you couldn’t fit Ibn Batuta into a tweet.

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Robert Fisk writes for the Independent, where this column originally appeared. 

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Emmanuel Macron & the Friends He Made on the Way to Elysée Palace

Darko LazarThe politically correct Pope Francis recently offered his two cents on France’s presidential election. During his flight back to Rome earlier this month, he told reporters that he knew one of the candidates was an extreme far-right conservative, but that he didn’t even know who the other candidate was or “where he came from”.

Shortly afterwards, posts started popping up on social media networks, suggesting that the famously astute Jesuit couldn’t possibly be in the dark about Emmanuel Macron.

Perhaps the modern and emancipated pope felt that it wasn’t in his best interest to claim that France’s presidential frontrunner came straight from hell, as details about Macron’s backers and associates continued to shock the public.

“En Marche” or “Move on”?

Macron’s team is a reflection of the politics that the centrist candidate propagates – progressive ideas about multicultural societies, globalism, open borders, welcoming more migrants [cheap labor], and of course, a stronger Brussels.

His right-hand man, Pierre Bergé, who was ‘married’ to the late fashion icon Yves Saint Laurent and inherited his business empire, finances many of the world’s ‘progressive’ battles, longing for the day when religious occasions like Christmas and Easter will simply be referred to as winter and spring ‘holidays’.

Moreover, if statements by Macron guru and Elysée Palace insider Jacques Attali are anything to go by, the French have a rather peculiar future to look forward to.

In a 2014 interview with Italy’s La Repubblica, the French economist, philosopher and sociologist painted a picture of a world in which “human reproduction will be the job of machines”, and where a “surrogate mother can be anyone, even a person in the same family”.

Meanwhile, the head of Macron’s campaign and media tycoon, Bernard Mourad, served as a virtual guarantee that his candidate would enjoy an unprecedented level of positive media coverage.

Mourad, who was born to a Lebanese father and a Moroccan mother of Jewish descent, previously chaired the Altice Media Group, which controls a number of radio and television stations, as well as 60 dailies and magazines, including leading publications like Libération.

With the latter in mind, there is nothing particularly groundbreaking about this candidate or his agenda. As a matter of fact, analysts have pointed to the striking similarities between Macron’s ‘political ideals’ and those outlined by George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, including the name of his En Marche party, which appears to be little more than a translation of Soros’ Move On organization.

The Gulf Connection

Reports claiming that Macron’s campaign received some 30% of its revenue from Arab monarchies in the Persian Gulf were quickly debunked.

The mainstream media could finally claim a victory in the “fake news” war, and justifiably ignore meetings between Macron and members of the Saudi and Qatari royal families.

A March 2016 private encounter between Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Nayef and Macron was deemed unworthy of coverage by the mainstream press.

Equally ‘uninteresting’ was the news that Macron’s signature during his stint as France’s Minister of Economy and Finance approved the sale of 10 billion euros’ worth of arms to Riyadh.

On his watch, in fact, Saudi Arabia became the biggest single destination for French weapons systems. In 2015 alone, French commercial contracts with the Saudis reached a whopping USD 11.5 billion.

Macron’s lucrative links to the Qataris were also ignored.

The favorite in the race for France’s top job also happens to be a member of a small, informal club of Franco-Qatari investors and patrons.

In April 2016, Doha’s envoy to Paris described the 39-year-old as “a friendly, creative and innovative personality… the future is therefore his and I wish to Minister Macron all the successes in the service of his country and the strengthening of the relations of France with the friendly countries.”

And judging by the perks that the Qatari royal family enjoys in France, the Gulf monarchy certainly falls into the category of “friendly countries”.

Aside from purchasing billions of euros worth of trophy assets, ranging from the Champs-Elysees shopping mall to the Lido cabaret, the Qataris have also secured tax breaks in France. The concessions provide the Qatari investors with exemption from taxes on profits made when they eventually put the properties they purchased up for sale.

Similar investments, coming from the chief financiers of Daesh [Arabic acronym for “ISIS” / “ISIL”] and al-Qaeda, have helped to radicalize Muslim communities across France, whose young men were used to fill the ranks of militant groups fighting in Syria.

As such, one of En Marche’s co-founders, Mohamed Saou, who also enjoys close links to radicals in the Muslim Brotherhood, became an easy target for Le Pen’s campaign.

Macron responded in an interview with Beur FM radio, during which he said that Saou “did one or two things that were more… radical…. but he’s a good guy otherwise”.

Behind these good guys and slogans of a multicultural world without borders are very dangerous agendas and policies, laying bare the notion that when it comes to foreign policy, there is clearly little divergence between En Marche and the worldview of George Soros and his empire.

Source: Al-Ahed News

06-05-2017 | 10:14

Goodbye Fidel

The Saker

November 27, 2016

by Jimmie Moglia 

“He was a man, take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.”

Hamlet, act 1, sc. 2

For many across the world, the death of Fidel Castro strikes us with an obscure sensation, like that which would be felt from the sound of darkness. And though expected, there was an indistinct unuttered hope that this news could be postponed to a future yet undated and unnamed. But,

“… all that lives must die,
Passing through nature to eternity” (1)

In some European countries, newspaper articles written before the death of some important figure, are called “crocodiles”, lumping together those lamenting or rejoicing at that death, whenever it may occur.

And as we know, the European historical left has disappeared, replaced by an assembly of sycophants, buttock-lickers of transatlantic masters, muddled applauders of neo-liberal philosophy and regurgitators of grotesque distortions.

In one of which distortions, for example, the inimical, colonial role of the US towards Cuba is not even mentioned. Instead, Castro is labeled as a doctrinarian, bent on absolute dictatorship, who became a Marxist and eliminated all his opponents. Even clashing with the ideas of Che Guevara who was forced to try his luck at a revolution somewhere else.

Nor is it mentioned that in some fields Cuba is the most advanced country in Latin America, notably medicine. Including, for example, Cuba’s critical contribution to the defeat of the Ebola virus. And other unique pharmaceutical innovations, such as the only available treatment that prevents the amputation of the so-called “diabetic foot.” Medication until recently unavailable in the US due to the siege of Cuba, usually referred to as “embargo.”

Therefore, the European “crocodiles” reflect the crass negation of factual reality, or rather an Orwellian reality inspired by the tenets of post-democracy, post-truth, post-mathematics and even post-statistics, as the recent, uniform and unanimous Clinton-the-winner polls by mainstream media and academia demonstrate.

Yet, by an unexpected turn of history, the Cuban revolution has meanings as relevant today as in the late 1950s. For the revolution aimed both at social reforms and national independence. Nor the reforms could have been possible without independence. For the presence of “the few who had all” and “the all who had nought” was inherently linked to the neo-colonial (today re-baptized neo-liberal) policy of the effective, de-facto imperial ruler, 90 miles away.

Just as today, allowing for a change in times and circumstances, we can consider the so-called “European Union” as a kind of pre-Castro territory ruled by the United States, via its perennial proxies, much as Latin America had always been, barring recent exceptions. Meaning that there can be no reforms without returning to national independence.

The US elites assumed that Castro’s revolution would result in a minimal restructure of the Cuban administration, leaving untouched the massive inequalities, the immense private land-holdings, the state of servitude and the bordello-economy (even portrayed by Hollywood). In other words, an orange-revolution to strengthen a banana republic – a structure held together by American interests, and by the military, when necessary, as in all other Latin American countries.

But “in the reproof of chance lies the true proof of men.” (2) Incredulous, bewildered and amazed with wonder at the turn of Cuban events, the US leadership developed the thesis that the Cuban revolution would die if they killed Fidel. And following his death, the hated socialism would collapse like a house of cards. As a keen commentator noted, the thesis was also a way to exorcize the unthinkable idea that a socially-inspired government could exist at a short distance from the imperial coast, and in the conditions created and imposed by the embargo.

The US elite could not accept, let alone explain the popular consensus of the Cuban people for and towards Fidel Castro. Who can forget the images of Revolution Square in Havana, filled to the brim by people intently listening to Fidel’s extended, eloquent and at times even amusing oratory?

Unable to create an ISIS before its times, the US engaged into a series of assassination attempts, that would even be laughable, were it not for the many people who died in the process.

“That he should die is worthy policy;
But yet we want a colour for his death” (3)

Or so they thought, when they staged the Bay of Pigs invasion, supposedly attempted by “revolutionaries” in the payroll of the CIA. Invasion that also showed, after the fact, the lengths to which the parties responsible for the fiasco went, to cover their asses.

Nor we should forget Operation Northwood, intended to sink an American ship, kill American citizens on the mainland, and accuse Castro of the crimes. As we know, Kennedy rejected the program and it may have contributed to his assassination. Which, by extension, should also tell us some something about who did 9/11 and about the elephant in the room, that apparently no one in charge can see.

Much has been made by the Western media and governments that Castro stifled dissent. I remember clearly the words of Castro on the subject. We do not mind – he said – do not condemn or regret people who complain about this or that aspect of the government, because it is their government after all. But we cannot accept those people who are paid and financed by our enemies to work against our government.

After the experience of Ukraine (“We spent 5 billion $ to turn Ukraine into a “democracy” – said Victoria, f…k-the-Europeans, Nuland), who could still criticize Castro for his position on the issue?

He was accused of being a communist and a Russian ally. He actually wasn’t until the empire tried the Bay of Pigs invasion. The missile crisis, as we know, was both a result of the Bay of Pigs attempted invasion and of the US installation in Turkey of nuclear missiles aimed at the USSR.

Besides, the most recent historical developments have amply proven that communism was a convenient flag under which to conceal an inherent US-Western Russophobia, as evident in the current posture, political and military towards Russia, by the US and its minions. For a review of this subject see http://thesaker.is/the-ancient-spiritual-roots-of-russophobia/

Against Castro the US cabal tried it all and all was unsuccessfull. Eventually, they hoped that the fall of the USSR would lead to the fall of Cuba. They even had Pope Woytila visiting Havana, hoping that he would create there another Poland. Instead, he almost obtained the opposite effect. Contrary to relentless propaganda, Castro did not repress religion. But, as he expressed publicly to the Pope, the Catholic hierarchy, notably at the onset of the revolution sided with the oppressors, with the bordello keepers and the casino holders. Opposition to certain religious leaders does not mean opposition to religion, said Castro. Woytila was forced to declare, however platonically, against the embargo.

Still unable to explain the success of the Cuban revolution, some mainstream media pundits have now produced another theory. It was the very embargo that kept alive the Cuban regime.

Yet, these late hour explanations, the pleasure displayed at Castro’s death or the reflections on his regime are anachronistic. The system that for 60 years lay siege on Cuba and tried to kill her leader, seems to be sinking in its own contradictions, after the millions it killed worldwide and the commission of seemingly endless unspeakable crimes. A system so much depraved that the best it could produce for the world was a Clinton and a Trump. Along with the promise of new brothels, new oligarchs, new monopolists of consumerism and new XXI century Batistas. Which should be sufficient evidence that “something is rotten in the state of imperialism and neo-liberal economics.” (4)

While in Europe, a massively parasitic European parliament wants to censure (read ‘block’) politically unpalatable Internet channels. Perhaps it has not yet sunk into the minds of these people that the official media is but a sewer of lies and deception. And that for one censored site, uncounted more are ready to take over.

It was historically only yesterday when there was, effectively, only one media, with one message and one ideology. Other voices were unheard, for they were inaudible. And criticism was confined to metaphorically saying, “It is not nor it cannot come to good: but break, my heart; for I must hold my tongue.’ (5)

Nevertheless, it is still true that,

“…. Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass,
Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron,
Can be retentive to the strength of spirit” (6)

… the spirit that now is heard at large through the miracle of expanded electronic communications.

I will close by citing verbatim the homage to Fidel by George Galloway.

“Fidel Castro did not die. He is not dead, he lives-on in all of us and in the lives of our children, even though as yet unborn. And that is why these gold-tooth, scar faces are dancing in Miami today, because they think that they will be going be back to business as it was before.
The greatest legacy of Fidel Castro is that Cuba will never ever again be anybody’s casino, anybody’s bordello. It is a free country, thanks to the Cuban revolution and its leader Fidel Castro, one of the greatest human beings who ever lived, who ever walked this earth.
We were privileged to live in his era. Some of us were privileged to be his comrade and friend and to spend many hours with him.
He is not gone. Hasta la victoria siempre, Comandante Fidel Castro! Presente!”

1. Hamlet
2. Troilus and Cressida
3. King Henry VI, part 2
4. after Hamlet
5. Hamlet
6. Julius Caesar

In the play (opening quote). Hamlet’s comment on his father, slain by Hamlet’s uncle Claudius.

Pope Hates Walls–Unless They’re Made in Israel

Posted on October 14, 2016

by Richard Edmondson

 

You may have missed this. I did until a friend sent me a link to it a couple of days ago. Earlier this year, Pope Francis leveled criticism at Donald Trump over his proposal to build a wall along the US-Mexico border. The pontiff even went so far as to suggest that Trump, because of his desire to secure the border, couldn’t possibly be a Christian.

The bishop of Rome set off the tiff aboard the papal plane as he was flying home from Mexico, the country whose government Trump has made a scapegoat for all that ails the United States. And as Pope Francis found himself answering questions from reporters about Trump, he did not mince words.

“A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian,” Francis told reporters in response to a specific question about the presidential candidate, according to Reuters’ account. “This is not in the gospel.”

Asked by a reporter whether an American Catholic could vote for him, the pope demurred.

“As far as what you said about whether I would advise to vote or not to vote, I am not going to get involved in that. I say only that this man is not Christian if he says things like that,” he said, before referring to Trump directly: “We must see if he said things in that way, and in this I give the benefit of the doubt.”

The above comes from an article that appeared on Politico back in February. The pope, of course, is well aware of the wall which Israel has built, but apparently he has nothing to say about that.

Francis is not exactly a man of courage. Bashing Donald Trump is totally risk-free. Criticizing Israel, even its apartheid wall, which has been deemed illegal by the International Court of Justice, runs considerably greater hazards, and I guess the pope just isn’t up for it.

In responding to the comments, Trump called the Pope’s questioning of his faith “disgraceful.” In a way it’s hard to disagree.

“For a religious leader to question a person’s faith is disgraceful,” he asserted. “I am proud to be a Christian and as President I will not allow Christianity to be consistently attacked and weakened, unlike what is happening now, with our current President.”

He also said “they”–without specifying who he was referring to–are using the pope as a “pawn,” and suggested that Francis might have a change of heart were the Vatican ever to be attacked by ISIS.

If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS, which as everyone knows is ISIS’s ultimate trophy, I can promise you that the Pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been President because this would not have happened. ISIS would have been eradicated unlike what is happening now with our all talk, no action politicians…

No leader, especially a religious leader, should have the right to question another man’s religion or faith. They are using the Pope as a pawn and they should be ashamed of themselves for doing so, especially when so many lives are involved and when illegal immigration is so rampant.

Who does Trump mean by “they”? I guess you’ll have to ask him that question. All I can really say is this: that while Trump has his faults certainly, it is pretty clear that the neocons, who are just itching to get a war started with Russia, would have far greater influence in a Clinton presidency than under a Trump administration. Maybe that should be of greater concern to us at this point than Trump’s demeanor toward women.

Syrian Christian leader tells West: ‘Stop arming terror groups who are massacring our people’

Pope Francis (R) talks with Ignatius Aphrem II, Syriac Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch, during a meeting at the Vatican, on June 19, 2015.

by Ruth Gledhill

The world leader of Syria’s besieged Christians has issued a heartfelt plea to the West to “stop arming and supporting terrorist groups that are destroying our countries and massacring our people.”

The Patriarch of Antioch, Moran Mor Ignatius Aphrem II, said he was not asking the West for military intervention to defend Christians.

If the West wants to do something about the present crisis, the most effective thing would be to support local governments, which need sufficient armies and forces to maintain security and defend respective populations against attacks.

“State institutions need to be strengthened and stabilised. Instead, what we see is their forced dismemberment being fuelled from the outside,” he told Vatican Insider.

Patriarch Aphrem, head of the Syrian Orthodox Church, said the most blasphemous thing a person can do is to call suicide bombers “martyrs”.

“Throughout its journey through history the Church has also been a suffering Church,” he added. Speaking in the days after meeting the Pope in Rome, he had just returned from Qamishli, his home town, where he met thousands of new Christian refugees who fled after Islamic State jihadists attacked Hassake, in Jazira province.

Islamic State terrorists who die while carrying out their atrocities regard such deaths as martyrdom. They believe it secures them passage to paradise.

The Patriarch contradicted this view. He said: “Martyrdom is not a sacrifice offered to God, like those sacrifices which are offered to pagan gods. Christian martyrs do not seek martyrdom to demonstrate their faith. And they do not wilfully shed their blood in order to obtain God’s favour or some other prize, like Paradise.”

Along with bishops of his church he recently had talks with President Assad of Syria. “President Assad urged us to do everything in our hands to prevent Christians from leaving Syria. ‘I know you are suffering,’ he said, ‘but please don’t leave this land, which has been your home for thousands of years, even before Islam came.’ He said that Christians will also be needed when the time comes to rebuild this devastated country.”

He said the majority of Syrian citizens support Assad’s government and have always supported it.

“We recognise legitimate rulers and pray for them, as the New Testament teaches us. We also see that on the other side there is no democratic opposition, only extremist groups. Above all, we see that in the past few years, these groups have been basing their actions on an ideology that comes from the outside, brought here by preachers of hatred who have come from and are backed by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Egypt. These groups receive arms through Turkey too, as the media have shown us.”

He said Islamic State was not the Islam that Syrians have learned about andlived alongside for hundreds of years. “There are forces that fuel it with arms and money because it is useful in what Pope Francis calls the ‘war fought piecemeal’. But all this also draws on a perverse religious ideology that claims to be inspired by the Koran.”

source