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Vol. 75/No. 27      July 25, 2011

 
Anti-Catholic demagogy
underlies lawsuit
 
BY JOHN STUDER  
NEW YORK—Anti-Catholic conspiracy demagogy is central to a “birther”-related lawsuit before the Supreme Court of New York in Brooklyn contending that three candidates in the 2008 presidential race were not “natural-born” citizens, and that plaintiff Christopher-Earl Strunk should be awarded money damages and a court order nullifying the election results.

As reported in the July 4 Militant, the three presidential nominees named by Strunk are Democratic and Republican party candidates Barack Obama and John McCain, as well as Róger Calero, who ran on the Socialist Workers Party ticket both in 2008 and 2004. Attorneys for Calero, Obama, and McCain have each filed to have Strunk’s complaint thrown out by the court.  
 
‘Jesuit plot’
Strunk charges that the Catholic Church, the Pope, the Jesuit Order, the so-called Knights of Malta, and others are behind a far-reaching plot to destroy the U.S. government and take over the world.

In addition to the three 2008 candidates, other defendants named in Strunk’s suit are two prominent New York Jesuit priests, Joseph O’Hare and Joseph Parkes, along with well-known Democratic and Republican politicians who are Catholic. These include House minority and majority leaders Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner, Vice President Joseph Biden, New York governor Andrew Cuomo, and former White House national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. Others named by Strunk are Peter Peterson of the Council on Foreign Relations; real estate mogul and Democratic Party fund-raiser Penny Sue Pritzker; and financier George Soros, also a funder of Democratic candidates.

Strunk charges that O’Hare and Parkes are each “a fourth level induction member of the White and Black Pope’s Militia.” These Jesuit clergy, he says, conspired with leaders of the Council on Foreign Relations and others “in preparation for a banking and sub-prime mortgage collapse” that allowed the International Monetary Fund to engineer a “collapse of the living standards of the vast majority of Americans to that of a third world status.”  
 
Strunk’s alleged stalking horse
According to Strunk, the aim of the cabal he claims to have identified is to use political turmoil across North Africa and the Middle East to draw Washington into military action that “will be blamed on the U.S.A. thereby inciting the unity of international Sunni Islam and its future invasion of U.S. soil.” But Islam, Strunk claims, is in fact just a stalking horse for the rise to world power of “the final Pope of Rome.”

Strunk says this conspiracy “eclipses all other influences on SOEBARKAH”—Obama’s name in Indonesian, according to many birthers—“McCain and Calero.” His lawsuit demands that the Brooklyn court issue an immediate order for “restraint against interference by the Jesuit Order” and authorize “expedited discovery” against those Strunk claims are behind the conspiracy.

Strunk’s current suit is one of dozens he has filed over the last five years. In all of them, he says, the “Jesuits and Knights of Malta are at the center and must be mentioned in every opportunity as if discussing the weather.”

Anti-Catholic prejudice has gone hand in hand with anti-immigrant agitation throughout the history of the U.S. class struggle. In the 1800s racist and chauvinist movements targeted workers who were Catholic from Ireland, Italy, Germany, and elsewhere, charging they were beholden to the Pope and couldn’t be “real Americans.” In the opening decades of the 20th century, the Ku Klux Klan spearheaded attacks on Catholics, as well as African Americans, immigrant workers, and Jews, scapegoating them as responsible for economic and social problems facing workers and farmers.

The big majority of recent immigrants in the United States today are workers from Mexico and other countries in Central and South America, most of whose populations are Catholic.
 
 
Related articles:
Conspiracy mongers imperil working class  
 
 
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