Sunday, February 9, 2020

New Dimensions In Terrorism

     I wish I could honestly say I was surprised by this story:

     Jacksonville police said a van crashed into a Republican party tent where volunteers were registering voters Saturday afternoon.

     Jacksonville police say a driver intentionally crashed a van through a tent where Duval County GOP volunteers were registering voters Saturday afternoon.

     Nobody was injured in the 3:45 p.m. incident at the Walmart Supercenter, 11900 Atlantic Boulevard, near Kernan Boulevard in the Sandalwood neighborhood, Lt. Larry Gayle of the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office told reporters at the scene.

     Several Duval County GOP volunteers were working at the registration tent when a white man in his early 20s driving an older — possibly 1980s — brown van pulled up toward the tent.

     He then drove through the tent, endangering the lives of the workers and damaging the tent and tables, Gayle said.

     The driver then stopped, got out of the van and took a video of the scene before he “flipped off” the victims and fled, Gayle said.

     ...but I wasn’t. And before we get to the “Fran” part of this tirade, add the above to this story:

     Tax cuts for the wealthy constitute a “structure of sin,” Pope Francis said Wednesday in a passionate address calling for international wealth redistribution. “Every year hundreds of billions of dollars, which should be paid in taxes to fund health care and education, accumulate in tax haven accounts,” the pontiff told participants in a Vatican seminar, “thus impeding the possibility of the dignified and sustained development of all social agents.”

     “Today’s structures of sin include repeated tax cuts for the richest people, often justified in the name of investment and development,” Francis told the meeting organized by the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences. [Emphasis added by FWP.]

     My juxtaposition of the two is more than a mere Curmudgeonly caprice, I assure you.


     Allow me to ask you a question whose answer you think “should” be “obvious:” What is terrorism? That is: What are its genus — the superset of phenomena to which it belongs – and its differentia — the characteristic that distinguishes it from the other elements in that superset?

     There’s disagreement about the genus. Many people would say that terrorism must include violence, or at least a credible threat of violence. Indeed, most well-publicized acts of terrorism do include violence. But others – myself included – argue that terrorism is defined entirely by its object: the inducement of terror in a targeted population. That end need not require violence, or a threat of violence to come.

     An act of terrorism is one that is intended to terrorize: to create terror among its targets. Nothing else really matters.

     But why would anyone want to terrorize anyone else? Why, to get the people in the targeted group to comply with a particular agenda: i.e., to do, or not do, some particular thing. There may be real-life Jokers out there who just like to terrorize people for its own sake, but for our present purposes we can neglect them.

     To terrorize a man, you must target something he values greatly. “Temporal terrorist” Smith would target Jones’s life, his health, and his loved ones. But while such terrorists are relatively well known and understood, they’re not the only variety. “Spiritual terrorist” Davis would target the fate of Jones’s immortal soul.

     The unidentified Jacksonville driver mentioned in the first cited story, who employed violence to silence or scatter Republicans, conservatives, and Trump supporters, is a temporal terrorist. Jorge Cardinal Bergoglio, a.k.a. Pope Francis, is a spiritual terrorist: i.e., he has implied that unless you support his political prescriptions, your immortal soul is in danger of damnation. Granted that Bergoglio’s threats require that his targets be Catholics, but that’s an awfully big target group: about 75 million Americans and over a billion persons worldwide.

     In both cases, the terrorist is using terror to induce compliance with an agenda. Both are evil, though Gentle Readers may differ on the magnitudes involved.

     Bergoglio is not the first of his kind. There have been others, including several previous popes, of whom the same could be said. If you believe in the bifurcated afterlife of the Christian creed, then anything that endangers your prospects in that life is a tremendous threat: a terror. And all too many preachers, aware that their flocks look to them for wisdom and guidance, have used that terror to induce compliance with an agenda for which there is no basis in the Gospels of Jesus Christ.

     For a supposed Christian leader – indeed, the highest such in all the world – to resort to terrorism to promote an entirely non-Christian agenda is a crime that beggars my powers with words.


     I’m not the first to say this, nor is this the first time I say it: Christianity is the Gospels. All else is commentary by fallible men. Some may have been divinely inspired. Some may have been articulating the principles of the Gospels in a fashion we didn’t grasp before they came along. But only what is entirely consistent with Christ’s teachings in the Gospels may we defensibly call “God’s will for Man.” The root of it all, as I have written many times before, lies in the Two Great Commandments:

     But the Pharisees hearing that he had silenced the Sadducees, came together: And one of them, a doctor of the law, asking him, tempting him: Master, which is the greatest commandment in the law?
     Jesus said to him: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. And the second is like to this: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments dependeth the whole law and the prophets. [Matthew 22:34-40]

     I have resisted the calls to label Jorge Bergoglio an anti-pope...until now. I shall do so no longer.

4 comments:

NITZAKHON said...

Can a Pope be impeached? IIRC there's a removal procedure but I don't know a lot about it.

To the point of the attack: On LinkedIn I recently saw, on a thread dominated by the Left, someone call us "subhuman scum".

When you mix an air of superiority that they have, a perception of us to the Right of Stalin as "subhuman scum", and a belief that we are standing in their way of creating paradise on earth - which no good person could possibly oppose - that's a recipe for mass murder.

Don't forget, we Jews (and others too) were murdered not because we were an actual danger - most Jews in Europe were highly assimilated - but rather because, drip drip drip over a decade or so, the German people had come to believe we were outright evil. Thus, killing us came to be seen as a moral imperative.

Begging Francis' pardon, I will self-reference here because it's completely appropriate:

From https://redpilljew.blogspot.com/2018/08/the-scarlet-r.html

Quote (original wording about Jews and the agitprop war on Israel):

"Don't be fooled. this has not been an accidental strategy. It has a clear purpose. The purpose is not criticism of Conservatives nor a discussion of the issues; the purpose is to paint Conservatives as the ultimate evil. … If Conservatives are the ultimate evil, then shouldn't people of good will do something to make sure that that evil is erased from the face from of the earth? … Their minds [are being] prepared to [… accept…] that by eliminating Conservatives, they [… will be] ridding it of a disease. So, if you think about it and history, the greatest atrocities have been preceded by the preparation of people's minds. This is what we're seeing today. This is the nature of this war."

End quote

An internet friend, Jewish and Right, gets venom daily in his inbox from former-friend JINOs on the Left. And while he didn't say precisely what was written, apparently it's truly vile.

These people are ABSOLUTELY CONVINCED:

* They can create a paradise on earth through Socialism
* We oppose it
* Therefore, we are evil (and "subhuman scum")

The elements are all there.

Kye said...

Good, Francis. Call it and him what it is.

John Henry Eden said...

Thank God for Martin Luther.

George True said...

And of course the fake news MFM is singularly uninterested in even mentioning this little incident of attempted vehicular homicide on the part of a fully indoctrinated young Leftist. Now had the perp been a young Rightist mowing down a voter registration tent filled with Democrats, it would have been non-stop 24/7 media coverage preaching the evils of all conservatives. In fact, it would have been Trump's fault, don'tcha know, for all of his divisive, racist, hate-filled tweets or something.

As for Bergoglio, he has spent his entire life steeping in liberation theology, aka Communism. He is no Pope.