Baa-baa-baa! This one got buried in all the Mahmoudmania - that and they held the meeting on the down-low.
Ahmadinejad meets clerics, and decibels drop a notch.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran held a friendly, even warm, exchange yesterday with Christian leaders from the United States and Canada convinced that dialogue is the only way to prevent war. (I guess the Canadians didn't get the memo the Iranians distributed at the UN taking them to task on their 'human rights abuses'.)
If what happened next isn't da‘wa I'll eat your hat! (da'wa: literally summons, mission or invitation to Islam. Amongst Shia Muslims it is the invitation to adopt the cause of the Imamat. The Imamat refers to the institution of hereditary spiritual leadership in Shia Islam.)
The session, held under tight security at a chapel across the street from the United Nations, was a reminder that Mr. Ahmadinejad is a religious president of a religious nation who relishes speaking on a religious plane. He spent his 20 allotted minutes at the start of the two-hour meeting recounting the chain of prophets central to Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and the commonality of their messages.
And the meeting was held on the down low - lily livered chicken shits.
Given the furor over Mr. Ahmadinejad’s earlier appearances, there was no advance publicity. The gathering, which included an audience of about 140 other religious leaders, was organized by the Mennonites and Quakers, churches known for their commitment to pacifism.
Gee, Mr. Jewish leader. You don't want to have lunch with a holocause denier who thinks your a pig and wants to wipe you off the face of the earth? Why not? (do I really have to add the sarc tag here?)
The organizers said that they had pressed hard to find a Jewish leader to join the panel of questioners, but that those invited declined because they could not win support from Jewish organizations.
Dialogue, schmialogue. Dialogue is just so much simpering and whimpering in the eyes of Arab World - while they nod and bow and lie through their teeth.
“My heart was broken that there was so little support from other religions to be here,” said Mary Ellen McNish, general secretary of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group that helped sponsor the event. “If we don’t walk down this path of dialogue, we’re going to end up in conflagration.”
Just like good little dhimmis...
At the clerics’ meeting, Albert Lobe, executive director of the Mennonite Central Committee, said pointedly, “We mean to extend to you the hospitality which a head of state deserves.” The session was part of a concerted push by these religious leaders to increase political support in the United States for talks with Iran. Some of these religious leaders also met with Mr. Ahmadinejad last year in New York and in February on a trip to Iran.
At last, a voice of sanity.
One critic said that these religious leaders were well intentioned, but naïve. Malcolm I. Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, said in a telephone interview: “They’re not going to convince him. Their very presence there gives him respectability.”
A classic case of the down is up, up is down thinking so prevalent among the far left.
Ms. McNish, of the American Friends Service Committee, said the reverse was true: “The more we isolate him, the more support he gets at home.”
Man, it's looking like the Bahais are history. Listen to this - the Bahais wanted to attend but the Iranians refused to do so if the Bahais showed up. Does that take brass balls or what?
But even the Bahais, a minority religious group that has suffered persecution in Iran, said they supported these efforts at dialogue with the Iranian government. They had been invited to the prior meetings, but the Iranian side refused to come if Bahais were there, said Kit Bigelow, director of external affairs, National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahais of the United States.
The panelists on Wednesday included the Rev. Drew Christiansen, a Roman Catholic who is editor in chief of America, a Jesuit weekly; Karen A. Hamilton, a Canadian Anglican who is general secretary of the Canadian Council of Churches; the Rev. Chris Ferguson, also a Canadian, who represents the World Council of Churches at the United Nations; and Glen Stassen, a professor of Christian ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary, an evangelical institution.
Mr. Stassen evidently wants to 'dialogue' with Iran like in North Korea so they will ship all their nuclear material to Syria. I've got a better idea, Glen. Stick with the global warming, will ya?
Mr. Stassen, who has helped to prod American evangelicals to take on issues including global warming and torture, said he and other evangelicals would soon circulate a document intended to broaden support for dialogue with Iran, based on the model of dialogue with North Korea.
Naive isn't the word to describe these lambs of God. I guess they haven't heard of taquiyah.
Mr. Stassen asked President Ahmadinejad, if the United States could guarantee no aggression against Iran, “could there be an Iranian guarantee of no violence against Israel?”
Caused the pipsqueak to blink - he had to ask for a taquiyah break! P.S. You will note the pledge of agreement was not forthcoming from the Iranian one.
Mr. Ahmadinejad responded by asking for a three-minute break “for the interpreter.” After the break, he said that it was the United States and “the Zionist regime” that had nuclear weapons, while Iran was seeking to enrich uranium only for “fuel purposes.”
The impetus for these talks came not from the Americans, but from the Iranians, said Ed Martin, Iran consultant for the Mennonite Central Committee, a group that has done aid work in Iran. Of course it came from the Iranians, you dolt. They'll be using this propaganda up til the Pipsqueak runs for President again. Or he gets nukes and lets one rip. Anywho - Let's take a little trip down memory lane and revisit Christians and Tyrants of the olden days, shall we? Boundless webzine's article Hitler Vs. The Church gives us this handy summation:
From the start of the Nazi movement, “the destruction of Christianity was explicitly recognized as a purpose of the National Socialist movement,” said Baldur von Scvhirach, leader of the group that would come to be known as Hitler youth. But “explicitly” only within party ranks: as the OSS stated, “considerations of expedience made it impossible” for the movement to make this public until it consolidated power.
So the Nazis lied to the churches, posing as a group with modest and agreeable goals like the restoration of social discipline in a country that was growing permissive. But as they gained power, they took advantage of the fact that many of the Protestant churches in the largest body (the German Evangelical Church) were government-financed and administered. This, the OSS reported, advanced the Nazi plan “to capture and use church organization for their own purposes” and “to secure the elimination of Christian influences in the German church by legal or quasi legal means.”
And what about the RC's?
The Roman Catholic Church was another story; its administration came from Rome, not within German borders, and its relationship with the Nazis in the 1920s had been bitter. So Hitler lied again, offering a treaty pledging total freedom for the Catholic church, asking only that the church pledge loyalty to the civil government and emphasize citizens’ patriotic duties — principles which sounded a lot like what the church already promoted. Rome signed the treaty in 1933.
Only later, when Hitler assumed dictatorial powers, did his true policy toward both Catholics and Protestants become apparent. By 1937, Pope Pius XI denounced the Nazis for waging “a war of extermination” against the church, and dissidents like the Lutheran clergyman Martin Niemoller openly denounced state control of Protestant churches. The fiction of peaceful coexistence was rapidly fading: In the words of The New York Times (summarizing OSS conclusions), “Nazi street mobs, often in the company of the Gestapo, routinely stormed offices in Protestant and Catholic churches where clergymen were seen as lax in their support of the regime.”
Wow. Deja vu all over again.
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