THE CHURCH MILITANT
Ephesians 5:11-"And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them". This Christian News Blog maintains a one stop resource of current news and reports of its own related to church, moral, spiritual, and related political issues, plus articles, and postings from other online discernment ministries, and media which share the aims to obey the biblical commands to shed light on and refute error, heresy, apostasy, cults, and spiritual abuse.
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This is brazen, but why not? This jihad propaganda outfit has masqueraded for years as an actual news organization, with willing help and cooperation from the Left.
“Al Jazeera Spied on American Jews to Make an Anti-Israel Film. Congress Just Got Invited to the Premiere,” by Adam Kredo, Washington Free Beacon, February 26, 2020:
Multiple congressional offices have received an invitation to the screening of a never-before-seen anti-Israel documentary produced by Al Jazeera that relies heavily on footage obtained by an undercover Qatari spy.
The event will feature a screening of The Lobby: USA, a previously unreleased documentary produced by Qatar’s Al Jazeera network, according to a copy of the invitation obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. The documentary never aired because it was revealed that much of the footage was obtained during a 2018 undercover surveillance operation on American Jews and pro-Israel groups in Washington, D.C.
Revelations of the spy effort sent shockwaves through the pro-Israel community—members of which were caught on film purportedly trying to extend Jewish influence in American politics. Concerns over the film’s reliance on undercover footage prompted members of Congress to call for Al Jazeera to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which requires state-backed actors to disclose their ties to foreign governments.
The documentary will finally see the light of day on Friday at an event for congressional staffers.
Two progressive foreign policy think tanks—the Center for International Policy (CIP) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS)—are slated to screen the documentary later this week during an event on “the pro-Israel lobby in the United States,” according to a copy of the invitation addressed to congressional staffers. It is unclear how many offices received invitations.
At the event, a “panel of experts will discuss domestic groups that are working with the government of Israel to stifle critics and Palestinian rights advocacy in the U.S., but have not registered under FARA,” according to the invitation.
The organizers maintain that pro-Israel organizations in the United States should be subject to FARA disclosure laws because of their work to foster an alliance with the Jewish state. Liberal critics of the pro-Israel movement insist these groups are beholden to the state of Israel, thus necessitating FARA disclosure.
Al Jazeera—which is funded and controlled by the state of Qatar, a nation known for funding anti-Israel movements and taking a permissive attitude towards terrorism financing—has not registered as a foreign agent under FARA.
The panel discussion “will be preceded by a screening of a 24-minute segment from the never-shown 2018 Al Jazeera documentary The Lobby: USA on the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S. This four-part documentary never aired following the Qatari government’s decision to ‘postpone’ its release,” the event invitation says.
The panel discussion on the Al Jazeera film will feature several anti-Israel activists, including James Kleinfeld, the individual identified as conducting the 2018 spy operation on the Jewish and pro-Israel communities in the United States. After his identity was discovered, Kleinfeld fled the United States, but has now returned to promote the Al Jazeera documentary….
GET CHILDREN OUT OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS, WARNS ARIZONA EDUCATION CHIEF IN VIDEO WITH ALEX NEWMAN OF THE NEW AMERICAN
Former Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Diane Douglas, who oversaw the state Department of Education, sounded the alarm about what is happening in public schools across America in an interview with The New American magazine's Alex Newman.
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SAN FRANCISCO —David Daleiden of the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), along with his co-worker Sandra Merritt, pleaded not guilty on Friday to criminal counts surrounding an undercover investigation they conducted into Planned Parenthood and its business partners over the extraction, transferal and sale of the body parts of aborted babies. Daleiden and Merritt potentially face up to 10 years behind bars if convicted, but their defense states that the two did “an incredible public service” and should not be punished.
“David is being charged as a criminal for using the same investigative reporting techniques regularly exercised by other journalists,” Daleiden defense attorney Peter Breen, senior counsel at the Illinois-based Thomas More Society, said in a statement.
“These industry practices are often lauded and rewarded, but here in California, Mr. Daleiden is being charged as a criminal and threatened with years in prison for shining his investigative light on the dark secrets of the abortion industry.”
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra charged Daleiden and Merritt in December with:
eight counts of eavesdropping and recording “confidential communication” by secretly taping their discussions,
one count of creating a “deceptive identification document” used for “fraudulent purposes” by registering under a fake business name to conduct their undercover investigation,
and one count of conspiracy to record confidential information by posing as BioMax employees to gain access to abortion-related exhibitions and speak with Planned Parenthood representatives and its business partners.
Daleiden and Merritt pleaded not guilty to nine of the ten counts on Friday, and a demurer was filed for the tenth count, which is similar to requesting a dismissal. Breen notes that the recordings were all made in public restaurants and at public events, and so there was no expectation of privacy in the discussions.
A preliminary hearing was held in September before Judge Christopher Hite, during which time a number of abortionists took the stand to discuss their practices, as well as a fetal remains broker who acknowledged that the body parts of aborted babies were being sold. The sale of “fetal tissue” for profit is illegal under federal law.
Breen is already filing an appeal of the decision to allow the criminal counts against Daleiden and Merritt to move forward in the first place as he believes Hite “didn’t at all address our critical argument that they had clear evidence that violent felonies were occurring inside of Planned Parenthood and otherwise.”
“David and Susan face 10 years — a decade — in San Quentin penitentiary if those felony counts were to be upheld,” he lamented in a video update posted online. “Outrageous. The first time and the only time undercover journalists have been charged with … the illegal taping law [in California].”
Click to enlarge.
As previously reported, Daleiden and Merritt attended abortion industry conferences from 2013 to 2015 under the names Robert Sarkis and Susan Tennenbaum and with the impression that they were representatives of a company they called BioMax Procurement Services. They recorded their conversations as they sought to learn about Planned Parenthood’s abortion practices and harvesting partnerships.
CMP then publicly released video footage of the undercover investigation, showing various Planned Parenthood leaders and representatives of biomedical companies callously discussing extracting unborn children from the womb so that their body parts can be collected and sold for research.
“We’ve been using them for over 10 years, really a long time, [and we] just kind of renegotiated the contract,” Katherine Sheehan, the medical director for Planned Parenthood Pacific Southwest, said of Advanced Bioscience Resources (ABR) in one video. “They’re doing the big collections for government-level collections and things like that.”
Cost per each liver and thymus was $680, but increased in May 2018 to $750. See the documentation here as obtained by Judicial Watch following a lawsuit against HHS.
The government has also issued grants for extramural projects at universities — such as the University of San Francisco — that use the remains of unborn children in testing via “humanized mice.”
“[M]ost of the time, it is not intact,” Parrin Larton of ABR stated in one of the videos recorded by Daleiden. “The abdomen is always ripped open.. … Everything will just get ripped up, you know. Whenever we have a smooth portion of liver, we think that’s good, because most of the time, just the instruments they go in to pull and it’s just whatever presents first.”
“I’d say a lot of people want liver. And for that reason, most providers will do this case under ultrasound guidance, so they’ll know where they’re putting their forceps,” she explained. “[Y]ou’re just kind of cognizant where you put your graspers. You try to intentionally go above and below the thorax, so that — you know.”
“We’ve been very good at getting the heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so ‘I’m not gonna crush that part. I’m gonna basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact.’”
Planned Parenthood and ABR, as well as other business partners, are reportedly under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice following a referral from Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Charles Grassley, R-Iowa.
“[I]n June of 2014, an ABR technician obtained a 20-week-old fetus at a Planned Parenthood clinic, for which it paid $60,” the Committee outlined in a report. “From that one fetus, ABR sold its brain to one customer for $325, both of its eyes for $325 each ($650 total) to a second customer, a portion of its liver for $325 to a third customer, its thymus for $325 and another portion of its liver for $325 to a fourth customer, and its lung for $325 to a fifth customer.”
In addition to making over $2,200 from just one baby, ABR also allegedly charged shipping and disease screening fees, making over $6,000 from a single child. A technician from ABR would go to Planned Parenthood and personally collect the aborted baby body parts on site the day of the procedures, the committee found.
Planned Parenthood had claimed following the release of Daleiden’s videos, which were first posted online in 2015, that the footage had been deceptively edited, but Daleiden had also publicly released the hours-long recordings in their entirety in addition to his concise video highlights. All the videos may be viewed in their entirety on the Center for Medical Progress YouTube page.
The federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals also noted in January 2019 in a case surrounding Texas’ decision to terminate its Medicaid contract with Planned Parenthood that the state Office of the Inspector General (OIG) “submitted a report from a forensic firm concluding that the video was authentic and not deceptively edited. And the plaintiffs (Planned Parenthood) did not identify any particular omission or addition in the video footage.”
“[T]here is no question that the OIG here made factual findings after viewing the videos and related evidence,” outlined Judge Edith Jones, nominated to the bench by then-President Ronald Reagan.
“The OIG further concluded, based on the videos, that the provider plaintiffs at a minimum violated federal standards regarding fetal tissue research and standards of medical ethics by allowing doctors to alter abortion procedures to retrieve tissue for research purposes or allowing the researchers themselves to perform the procedures,” she wrote.
“What Sandra and I both did is no different from what local news sources and local news outlets do every single day here in the state of California when they go undercover and publish undercover hidden camera news stories,” Daleiden, a Roman Catholic who appears to be favorable toward homosexuals, said of his investigation in 2017.
“The only difference is that we went after and we recorded and we exposed the sacred cows of the California political establishment: Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Federation and their allies and proxies in the abortion industry — the political backers of the organs of power in the state of California,” he stated.
In addition to the criminal charges, Daliden and Merritt are facing several civil lawsuits. In November, a jury awarded Planned Parenthood over $2 million after finding that Daleiden and CMP caused “substantial harm” to the organization through the expose’ videos.
“Planned Parenthood wants a permanent injunction against David Daleiden from ever going undercover against Planned Parenthood — for the rest of his life,” Breen explained.
The National Abortion Federation (NAF) has also obtained an injunction preventing Daleiden from releasing any more videos he recorded undercover at the organization’s conferences. One video Daleiden released in defiance of the injunction featured clips of various Planned Parenthood officials and other abortion advocates making nonchalant statements about the abortion process, including that the baby’s eyeballs fell into their lap or that they had to tear off a leg to avoid technically performing a partial-birth abortion.
“Really high stakes here, both for the public, for the pro-life movement [and] just for the future of the country,” Breen said. _____________________________________________________________
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Turkey has announced it is suspending border controls for foreign migrants hoping to cross into Europe, according to reports.
Millions of migrants currently being ‘hosted’ in Turkey are now invited to journey onwards to the European Union.
“We have decided, effectively immediately, not to stop Syrian refugees from reaching Europe by land or sea,” an unnamed Turkish official told Reuters.
“All refugees, including Syrians, are now welcome to cross into the European Union.”
The move reportedly comes in retaliation for an airstrike by Russian-backed Syrian forces that killed 33 Turkish soldiers in Idlib.
“In anticipation of the imminent arrival of refugees from Idlib, Turkish police, coastguard and border security officials have been ordered to stand down on refugees’ land and sea crossings towards Europe,” Reuters reports, citing the Turkish official.
Videos and photos purporting to show masses of mostly-male migrants moving towards Turkey's western border and into Europe have flooded social media.
Turkey has been threatening to "open the gates" to Europe and unleash many of the roughly 3.7 million 'refugees' being held there, many of whom arrived since the 2016 migrant crisis.
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Senate Democrats have blocked a bill by Republicans that would stop infanticide and require medical care and treatment for babies born alive after failed abortions, despite the bill’s support among even those who classify themselves as pro-abortion.
The Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act would require doctors to provide medical care for infants who survive attempted abortions. Anyone who violates the act would be subject to a fine or imprisonment up to five years. The bill is one of two abortion-related bills that were voted on in the Senate on Tuesday.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell filed for a procedural motion earlier this month that would set up votes on the Pain Capable Unborn Child Act and Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act after the Senate’s Presidents’ Day recess. The votes required a 60-vote threshold to end Democratic filibuster, but both votes fell short. The Senate voted 56-41 on the anti-infanticide bill, with just three Democrats — Doug Jones of Alabama, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, and Joe Manchin of West Virginia — breaking from their party to vote in support of the legislation, CNN reports.
With Republicans holding just 53 seats in the Senate, the votes were expected to fail, but Republicans are hopeful they will serve to highlight the radicalism of the Democrats, particularly of the Democratic presidential candidates — Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Amy Klobuchar — who have now been forced to go on record on the issues.
“Having these two votes come back to back absolutely puts pro-abortion Democrats on the defense,” said Mallory Quigley, spokeswoman for Susan B. Anthony List, the Washington Examiner reports. “We are asking them to support popular legislation, compassionate legislation to save babies and to stop late-term abortion. If they can’t do that, can they then take a stand for born children who have survived abortions?”
National polling has shown a large majority of Americans, including those who describe themselves as pro-choice, oppose infanticide, as well as late-term abortions. The Democratic filibuster of the bills underscores just how far removed they are from their constituents.
Predictably, pro-abortion advocates such as Jacqueline Ayers, Planned Parenthood’s vice president of government relations and public policy, contend the Born-Alive bill would somehow target abortion access. She said in a statement Monday that “these bills push misinformation meant to end access to abortion, and serve no other purpose than to shame patients and deny people the ability to make the best medical decisions for themselves and their families.”
But Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska, the Republican sponsor of the bill, pushed back on that sentiment, noting the bill has nothing to do with abortion access. Instead, he asserted the bill was about “making sure that every newborn baby has a fighting chance — whether she’s born in a labor and delivery ward or whether she’s born in an abortion clinic.”
Senator Sasse sought to bring the issue underlying the bill to the forefront of the debate: “I urge my colleagues to picture a baby that’s already been born, that’s outside the womb gasping for air. That’s the only thing that today’s vote is actually about. We’re talking about babies that have already been born. Nothing in this bill touches abortion access.”
And while the Democrats claim the Born-Alive bill is unnecessary, statistics and personal testimonies prove otherwise.
During a recent congressional hearing titled “The Infant Patient: Ensuring Appropriate Medical Care for Children Born Alive,” for example, Family Research Council staffer Patricia Mosley told the Senate that existing law is failing to protect babies born alive during botched abortions.
“There have been no cases involving prosecutions under the [2002] Born-Alive Infants Protection Act that we know of. Why? Because there is currently no federal criminal statute specifically prohibiting taking the lives of born-alive infants,” she said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that between 2003 and 2014, at least 143 babies were born after botched abortions and lived anywhere from minutes to days. The CDC admits that number could be significantly understated, a likely possibility according to Family Research Council’s Arina Grossu, who observed, “[Kermit] Gosnell is only one abortionist who was responsible for ‘hundreds of snippings’ of born-alive babies, yet he did not report even one.” She added, “His numbers alone exceed the ‘definitive’ numbers of the CDC.”
The American Center for Law and Justice believes the number could be as high as 362 babies born alive between 2001 and 2010.
The numbers are particularly hard to determine, as most states do not require such data to be maintained.
Registered nurse Jill Stanek provided personal testimony about her experience with infants born alive during failed abortions during 2019 congressional testimony on the Born Alive bill. Her disturbing testimony revealed the protocol at the hospital at which she worked was to leave the infants in a “soiled utility room” to die.
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The New York Times has added another lawsuit to the workload of its legal team.
In addition to fighting a defamation claim from former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, the Times must defend itself from the Trump campaign, which filed a defamation lawsuit yesterday.
The Times and former editor Max Frankel smeared the campaign in an opinion piece, the lawsuit alleges, which said the campaign hatched a “deal” with the Russian government in 2016 to defeat the Times’s preferred candidate, Hillary Clinton.
The Times knew Frankel’s absurd claim was false, the lawsuit alleges, because the Times itself debunked it in multiple stories.
Whether the campaign will prevail is another. A public figure such as the campaign rarely succeeds in such a lawsuit.
The Lawsuit
The Times’s latest legal trouble began on March 27 last year, the day it published Frankel’s hit piece, “The Real Trump-Russia Quid Pro Quo.”
Wrote Frankel, who calls himself a “Democrat with a vengeance”:
There was no need for detailed electoral collusion between the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin’s oligarchy because they had an overarching deal: the quid of help in the campaign against Hillary Clinton for the quo of a new pro-Russian foreign policy, starting with relief from the Obama administration’s burdensome economic sanctions. The Trumpites knew about the quid and held out the prospect of the quo.
Yet Frankel’s piece “does not allege or refer to any proof of its claims of a ‘quid pro quo’ or ‘deal’ between the Campaign and Russia,” the lawsuit alleges, but instead “selectively” included “previously-reported contacts between a Russian lawyer and persons connected with the Campaign.” Previous reporting in the Times showed “that the meetings and contacts ... did not result in any quid pro quo or deal.”
The report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of the collusion hoax showed the story to be false weeks after the story was published, but the Times knew that long before Frankel’s smear appeared, the lawsuit alleges.
Thus, the lawsuit alleges, the Times’s “own reporting, had already confirmed what Robert Mueller would eventually conclude: that there was no ‘deal’ or ‘quid pro quo’ between the Campaign and Russia. The Times and its writer, Mr. Frankel, consciously disregarded all such information.” That reporting appeared in three stories, two of them published nearly two years before Frankel went off half-cocked.
As well, the lawsuit alleges, the Times “decided to publish the Defamatory Article when it did, in advance of the Mueller Report, knowing that the Mueller Report was likely to exonerate the Campaign from allegations of collusion with Russia regarding the 2016 election”:
Once the Mueller Report was released, The Times knew that any claims of conspiracy would not be credible. Thus, by publishing the Defamatory Article in March 2019, The Times sought to damage the Campaign before the Mueller Report would be released debunking the conspiracy claims.
The Times published Frankel’s claims because of its “systematic pattern of bias against the Campaign, designed to maliciously interfere with and damage its reputation and seek to cause the organization to fail,” the lawsuit alleges.
If true, the campaign has a case for malice and reckless disregard of the truth, proof of which is required for a public figure to successfully sue.
Can the Campaign Win?
“A publisher cannot be held liable for commentary based on public facts,” a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union told the Times.
Frankel’s claim, of course, was not a “fact,” but a falsehood, but the campaign must still prove the newspaper “knew it was false before publishing, or had actual suspicion of falsity and went ahead anyway,” which is “virtually impossible,” a law professor told the Times. The U.S. Supreme Court invented that standard in 1964’s New York Times vs. Sullivan decision.
The lawsuit’s allegations would seem self-evidently true given that the Times’s own reporting showed Frankel’s factual claim to be false, but again, proving that is problematic.
HARRISBURG, PENNSYLVANIA: ROMAN CATHOLIC DIOCESE FILES FOR BANKRUPTCY IN THE FACE OF LIABILITIES FROM CHILD SEX ABUSE BY PRIESTS TOTALING AT LEAST 311 CASES
ANOTHERROMAN CATHOLIC DIOCESE FILES FOR BANKRUPTCY OVER CHILD ABUSE LIABILITIES
The Roman Catholic diocese of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, has filed for bankruptcy in the face of millions of dollars in liabilities over child sex abuse by priests. The diocese has settled 111 cases, but there are an estimated 200 more. It claims liabilities of between $50 million and $100 million, with assets of less than $10 million. The announcement comes after the disclosure that the diocese paid $12 million to people abused as children. In 2018, a grand jury concluded that more than 1,000 children were abused by Roman Catholic priests in six Pennsylvania dioceses alone over the last several decades. The report, the product of a two-year investigation, identified 300 abusing priests and lay “brothers” and found evidence of a systematic cover-up by senior church leaders in Pennsylvania and at the Vatican in Rome (“Report Identifies More Than 1,000,” Associated Press, Aug. 14, 2018). At a news conference, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro said, “The cover-up was sophisticated. And all the while, shockingly, church leadership kept records of the abuse and the cover-up. These documents, from the dioceses’ own ‘Secret Archives,’ formed the backbone of this investigation.” The six dioceses represent only half of the Catholic churches in Pennsylvania. Most of the victims were boys. The Roman Catholic Church in America has paid over $2 billion to settle lawsuits against immoral priests. The Bishop Accountability organization said that more than 4,000 priests have been accused of abusing children (“US Church to Pay 12.6 Million,” AFP, Aug. 11, 2008). A conservative Catholic organization documented this wretched business in the fall/winter 2002 issue of the magazine Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, observing: “… the overwhelming majority of sexual abuse cases in the Catholic Church--about 90%--involve homosexual priests preying on teenage boys. The major media and the U.S. culture at large want to deny or spin the homosexual factor out of the scandal.” So far, at least 22 Catholic dioceses and religious orders in the U.S. have filed for bankruptcy.
