Being a student of Cold War history comes in handy when you see a misleading headline like this:
Pro-life group urges Congress
to pass Senate health care bill
“Pro-life group,” my butt. Go down the list of names on that petition, do a little research and you discover that these are all advocates of “social justice,” including notorious anti-American “liberation theology” types like Jim Wallis of Sojourners:
Writing in the November 1983 issue of Sojourners, ministry leaders Jim Wallis and Jim Rice drafted what would become the charter of leftist activists committed to the proliferation of Communist revolutions in Central America. Titled “Promise of Resistance,” this document called on activists to carry out various acts of civil disobedience in order to obstruct any attempt by the United States to invade Nicaragua. CISPES, the propaganda arm of El Salvador’s Marxist guerrilla movement, was invited by Sojourners to participate in acts of resistance in the event of American military intervention. Nearly 70,000 activists signed the document, which was sent to Congress, President Reagan, the Defense Department, and the CIA.
Steadfast advocates of the nuclear freeze movement, Sojourners members maintained that a U.S. nuclear buildup was “an intolerable evil” irreconcilably at odds with Christian teaching, and that “[t]he Reagan Administration remains the chief obstacle to the first step in stopping the arms race.” While assailing the Reagan administration’s defense buildup, Sojourners activists downplayed the threat posed by the Soviet Union, chastising U.S. policy-makers for their tendency “to assume the very worst about their Soviet counterparts.”
If you don’t know that the “nuclear freeze” movement in the West was an anti-American propaganda campaign actively supported by the Soviets — see this 2001 Accuracy in Media report for background — you may not understand the profound significance of that single data point. But you can still probably understand the significance of this:
Sojourners is a member organization of the Win Without War and United for Peace and Justice anti-war coalitions. It condemns the Guantanamo Bay detention center, where several hundred terrorist suspects are being held by the U.S. government. Said the Sojourners website on June 10, 2005:
“Guantanamo Bay has become not only a symbol of the U.S. government’s hypocrisy and dishonesty — or ‘disassembling,’ as President Bush might put it — around the war on terror. The prison camp has become one of the more egregious examples of the cost of unaccountable power. Human rights groups have long documented the abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo, including desecration of the Quran. … The 540 prisoners at the facility have been held incommunicado, denied access to legal counsel, and, in fact, denied the most basic aspects of legal process. … Guantanamo should be closed. But simply closing the facility — and either moving the detainees to another location or returning them to their country of origin — is not enough. If the United States is to regain any credibility as an advocate of human rights around the world, it must begin to practice what it preaches in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Guantanamo, and everywhere else. The erosion of respect for human rights by U.S. personnel didn’t begin at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay, and the responsibility for it goes all the way to the top.”
Sojourners also gets funding from George Soros’ “Open Society” foundation. Sojourners and Wallis were pro-Soviet during the Cold War. They are pro-Obama now.
Their anti-American, anti-capitalist agenda remains the same.
UPDATE: Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit has more background on the signatories.
UPDATE II: Left Coast Rebel links with more.
UPDATE III: Dad29 points to the heterodox tendencies of another signatory, Marquette University professor Bryan Massingale.
Exit question: What’s up with the editors of the National Catholic Reporter publishing propaganda for these clowns? I’m not Catholic, so I don’t particularly care what the answer is, but it seems like a question worth asking.
