Republicans Playing to the Terrorists' Script

Passengers aboard the "St. Louis." These refugees from Nazi Germany were forced to return to Europe

While cooler heads argue logic, reason and deliberate screening efforts should prevail in processing refugees fleeing violence in their home countries, many in the Republican Party are doing exactly what ISIS wants and needs for its propaganda efforts.  From John Kasich's idiotic calls for a government agency to promote "Judeo-Christian" values, to Ted Cruz and others' calls to only accept Christian refugees, to efforts to claim that the Koran calls for death and murder while ignoring the horrors advocated in the Old Testament, the Paris attacks are being used to turn the struggle against ISIS into a war of religions.  That, of course is precisely what ISIS wants and needs as a recruiting and propaganda tool.   Sadly, the Republicans eager to prostitute themselves to the ugly, ignorant and extremist elements of the GOP base either do not care about the damage they are doing or are too stupid to grasp it.  A column in the New York Times looks at the sickening conduct and the farce it makes of supposed support of the Gospel message.  Here are excerpts:

Desperate refugees flee persecution and war, but American politicians — worried about security risks — refuse to accept them.

That’s the situation today, but it’s also the shameful way we responded as Jews were fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930s. In the shadow of one world war, on the eve of another, Americans feared that European Jews might be left-wing security threats.

[I]n January 1939, Americans polled said by a two-to-one majority that the United States should not accept 10,000 mostly Jewish refugee children from Germany. That year, the United States turned away a ship, the St. Louis, with Jewish refugee children; the St. Louis returned to Europe, where some of its passengers [some estimates say half] were murdered by the Nazis.

All the Republican presidential candidates say that we should bar Syrian refugees or apply a religious test and accept only Christians.

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey says we shouldn’t accept Syrians even if they are toddlers and orphans. And the House of Representatives may vote this week on legislation to impede the resettlement of Syrian refugees.

Remember what a Syrian immigrant looks like — the father of Steve Jobs.  

Yes, security is critical, but I’ve known people who have gone through the refugee vetting process, and it’s a painstaking ordeal that lasts two years or more. It’s incomparably more rigorous than other pathways to the United States.

If the Islamic State wanted to dispatch a terrorist to America, it wouldn’t ask a mole to apply for refugee status, but rather to apply for a student visa to study at, say, Indiana University. Hey, governors, are you going to keep out foreign university students?

Or the Islamic State could simply send fighters who are French or Belgian citizens (like some of those behind the Paris attacks) to the U.S. as tourists, no visa required. Governors, are you planning to ban foreign tourists, too?

If Republican governors are concerned about security risks, maybe they should vet who can buy guns. People on terrorism watch lists are legally allowed to buy guns in the United States, and more than 2,000 have done so since 2004. The National Rifle Association has opposed legislation to rectify this.

The Islamic State is trying to create a religious divide and an anti-refugee backlash, so that Muslims will feel alienated and turn to extremism. If so, American and European politicians are following the Islamic State’s script.  Let’s be careful not to follow that script further and stigmatize all Muslims for ISIS terrorism.

The top priority must be making Syria habitable so that refugees need not flee.  

Helping Syrian refugees today doesn’t solve the Middle East mess any more than helping Jewish refugees in 1939 would have toppled Hitler. But it’s the right thing to do. Syrians, no less than those Jewish refugees, no less than my father, are human beings needing help, not flotsam.

Sadly, to much of the GOP base, if one is not a white, heterosexual, conservative Christian, you are flotsam - flotsam to be discarded and deprived of rights and compassion.  So much for  heeding the Gospel message of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, giving shelter to the homeless and treating others as you would want to be treated.  Thankfully, the younger generations see this hypocrisy and are walking away from religion.

Why Michael Brown's Family Never Had a Chance at Seeing an Indictment

I have shared my views before on America's criminal justice system when it comes to the unequal treatment of minorities, especially blacks.  To call the system dysfunctional would be unduly kind.  Rigged, corrupt or biased are terms much more on target.  Howard Fineman has a piece at Huffington Post that evaluates why the Brown family had virtually no chance in seeing their son's killer indicted.  Remember, an indictment is not a conviction.  Rather it is merely a finding that a crime may have occurred and that a full, public trial is warranted to better determine guilt.  Sadly, in Missouri - and other places - even indicting so that a trial can proceed is near impossible given the bias in the system and the unwarranted deference to police.  One has to wonder what the rest of the world (especially countries where non-whites are a majority) must think of "American exceptionalism."  I would guess, not very much if not open disgust.  Here are article highlights:

If you know St. Louis, or Missouri for that matter, you know that the family of Michael Brown had no chance, and that police Officer Darren Wilson would go free.

St. Louis is a lovely place, but legally it can be a toxic police mixture of the Midwestern love of social order and Border State race-based severity.

The city is in some ways on the most tremulous fault line in the history of race in America: The home of W.C. Handy and the blues, of Chuck Berry and rock 'n roll, of the Dred Scott court decision on runaway slaves.

Not surprisingly, the Missouri state legislature has chosen repeatedly to ignore a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision of 1985, which held that a police officer cannot use lethal force against a fleeing suspect unless the officer has reason to believe the suspect is armed and an immediate threat to public order. 

Instead, a police officer in Missouri can shoot a person the officer believes to be a fleeing felon. Period. Not to mention that the officer can shoot one who is moving toward him in a threatening manner.

So the real complaint in Missouri on Monday night should not really be with the county prosecutor, however defensive and cloying he may have been in announcing the grand jury's failure to indict the officer who shot the teenager.

It is with Missouri, and America, for thumbs-on-the-scale state laws that the federal government -- from Abraham Lincoln forward -- has only partly ameliorated. 

St. Louis is emblematic of the glory and the tragedy of the racial history of which this case is only the latest example. The city was a licentious, anything-goes river town in which the slave trade flourished, and was run in later years by German-American burghers and scions of the slave-holding South who wanted to preserve order, and the Old Order.

Some laws are a holdover from those days. They made it easy for the grand jury to return a "no true bill" -- that is, no indictment on any charges -- against Wilson.

[L]et's make no mistake: St. Louis is as American, for better and for worse, as a city can get.

Cop Who Shot St. Louis Black Teen Has Racist and Anti-Gay Facebook Page

Jason Flanery (Instagram)

There are some very good police officers.  But there are some who should never wear a badge and carry a gun because they are bigots who care nothing for the rights - or lives - of those they deem "other."  Unfortunately, most police departments are more concerned about protecting their image than weeding out the bad apples.  Years ago when I was out with Wayne Besen I had my own run in with some Norfolk police who thought harassing gays was great sport.  When I filed a complaint, internal affairs fell all over itself to protect the officers involved.  

It seems something similar is going on in St. Louis where Jason H. Flanery, the off duty officer who shot and killed VonDerrit Myers Jr., had every indication of trouble waiting to happen.  Thanks to Facebook we are getting a glimpse of Flannery's anti-black and anti-gay mindset.  Read a reprint of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch story at The Raw Story.  The take away?  People like Flannery should never be police officers.

St. Louis Archbishop Carlson Implicated in Child Sex Abuse Claim

While Pope Francis has made some positive statements - much to the dismay of "conservative" Catholics - about gays and moving the Roman Catholic Church away from its obsession with gays, abortion and banning contraception, to date ha has not dealt with one of the true cancers within Catholicism: the worldwide sex abuse scandal/cover up.  He may soon have an opportunity to set an example and prove that he wants to clean up the moral cesspool in the Church hierarchy left by his predecessor, the Nazi Pope.  As a number of news outlets are reporting, the current archbishop of St. Louis has been implicated in the cover up of sexual abuse while he was an auxiliary bishop in Minnesota.  The St. Louis Post Dispatch has details.  Here are excerpts:

St. Louis Archbishop Robert Carlson didn’t report a clergy sex abuse claim to police in the 1980s when he was a leader with the Roman Catholic Church in Minnesota, according to a lawsuit filed there Tuesday. And the same priest in question allegedly went on to do more harm.

Carlson “went along to get along, and he got along quite well,” attorney Jeff Anderson, who is representing the most recent alleged victim, said of the St. Louis archbishop.

The lawsuit filed by “Jane Doe 23” claims the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis was negligent for allowing the Rev. Robert M. Thurner to work as a priest — with access to children — after he admitted to then-Archbishop John Roach that he bought a 16-year-old boy alcohol and sexually abused him.

Carlson, who came to St. Louis in 2009 from Saginaw, Mich., previously served as an auxiliary bishop in Minnesota, where he grew up. Carlson is named in the lawsuit as one of four church leaders who “learned or should have learned that Thurner had abused at least one child.”

A 1982 internal memo included in the new suit indicates that Carlson had been informed of Thurner’s behavior.

“Father Thurner explained that he had had a brief sexual relationship with a 16 year old boy and had also purchased liquor for that boy,” Roach wrote to “Father Carlson” and another church leader in the memo. “... Father Thurner reviewed with me a fairly long history of anger, depression and ambivalence about sexuality.” Roach also said in the memo that Thurner would write a letter of resignation and seek immediate “treatment” and “intensive spiritual direction.”

Despite a resignation letter, Thurner was moved to a different church in 1983. And parishioners weren’t warned about the priest’s admitted abusive behavior, according to the suit. It was there that Thurner allegedly met Jane Doe 23’s devout Catholic family.

Now in her 30s, she says Thurner sexually abused her around 1985, when she was in second grade. She thought she was his only victim and kept quiet until last week, when she found reference to another case online from the 1990s in which two men claimed Thurner had abused them as teenagers.

Katie Pesha, executive director of communications and planning for the Archdiocese of St. Louis, and Angie Shelton, a community relations specialist, did not return calls seeking comment Tuesday afternoon. The archdiocese rarely comments on litigation.

Carlson, who has mainly avoided controversy in the nationwide clergy sex abuse saga, has recently been targeted by victim advocates.

Apart from the Doe 23 case, the parents of a girl are suing the Archdiocese of St. Louis over claims that the Rev. Xiu Hui “Joseph” Jiang, an associate pastor at the St. Louis Cathedral Basilica in the Central West End, molested their daughter. Jiang, 30, who followed Carlson to St. Louis from Saginaw and was close to the archbishop, was charged last year with first-degree endangering the welfare of a child and tampering with a witness or victim. His criminal trial was recently postponed in Pike County. No date has been set.

Sadly, it's the same saga that we have seen and heard from all around the world.  Protecting the Church's assets and predator priests was more important than protecting innocent children and youths.  Unless and until there is a thorough house cleaning of the Church hierarchy, the Catholic Church will continue to have zero moral authority on anything.