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How Pope Benedict XVI Sparked Controversy with Quote on Islam Spreading ‘Evil’ by the Sword

Pope Benedict XVI, laid to rest at the Vatican on Thursday, stirred controversy early in his pontificate by quoting a Byzantine emperor critical of Islam.

A scholarly theologian who passed away aged 95 at the close of 2022, Benedict provoked suspicion if not hostility from much of the media establishment when he became pontiff in 2005, due to the widespread perception that he was a conservative — or at least a liberal turned conservative.

He was first pounced on in a sustained manner just a year into his pontificate when he gave his infamous Regendsburg address on September 12th 2006 — a day after the fifth anniversary of the September 11th radical Islamic terror attacks on the United States — in which he quoted from a dialogue between “an educated Persian” and Emperor Manuel II Paleologus.

Paleologus was the ruler of what historians now call the Byzantine Empire but what the Byzantines themselves insisted was the Roman Empire, though it no longer included Rome and was not in communion with the Roman Catholic Church.

“Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached,” Benedict quoted the emperor as saying, acknowledging that the Qur’an at one point says there should be no compulsion in religion but further noting that “[a]ccording to some of the experts, this is probably one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat… naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur’an, concerning holy war.”

Benedict further quoted the emperor as saying that God “is not pleased by blood”, and that “[w]hoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly… To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death”.

Though he said the emperor’s words were delivered with “a brusqueness that we find unacceptable” in his long and schlorarly address, Benedict was heavily criticised in the Islamic world and in the press, with Pakistan’s parliament passing a unanimous resolution condemning him and demanding an apology, Morocco’s autocratic king recalling his ambassador to the Vatican, and “Palestinians wielding guns and firebombs attack[ing] churches of various Christian denominations” in the West Bank and Gaza, according to National Public Radio (NPR).

Britain’s leftist Guardian, meanwhile, reported that the Muslim Council of Britain declared the “Byzantine emperor’s views about Islam were ill-informed and, frankly, bigoted,” and that a “religious leader such as the Pope [should] act and speak with responsibility and repudiate the Byzantine emperor’s views in the interests of truth and harmonious relations between the followers of Islam and Catholicism.”

Emperor Manuel II is believed to have made his remarks between 1394 and 1402, when Bayezid I, the Muslim ruler of the Ottoman Empire, was besieging his capital, Constantinople, in an effort to starve it into submission.

The city survived this siege, but was conquered by the Ottomans during the reign of Manuel’s son, Constantine XI, in 1453, with many of its inhabitants murdered or enslaved, countless Christian icons and relics destroyed or plundered, and its ancient churches desecrated, including the Church of the Holy Wisdom or Hagia Sophia — then the greatest cathedral in the world, now forcibly converted into a mosque.

Benedict, for his part, expressed great regret at the offence he had caused, and the Vatican’s online copy of his address contains a footnote lamenting that the quotation “has unfortunately been taken as an expression of my personal position, thus arousing understandable indignation.”

“I hope that the reader of my text can see immediately that this sentence does not express my personal view of the Qur’an, for which I have the respect due to the holy book of a great religion,” the pontiff added.

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2023/01/06/pope-benedict-xvi-spraked-controversy-with-quote-islam-speading-evil-by-sword/

Prince Harry Claims Magic Mushrooms, Cannabis, Cocaine Let Him See ‘The Truth’

Troubled California-based royal Harry, Duke of Sussex, has suggested that illegal drug abuse helped him see “the truth”, according to his memoir Spare.

While the Z-list style tell-all memoir, which also details such inglorious incidents as Harry losing his virginity outdoors to an older woman who treated him like a horse and being tossed into a dog food bowl by brother William during an argument over Meghan Markle’s alleged rudeness, was not supposed to be released until Tuesday, with pre-release publicity tightly controlled through tame legacy media journalists.

This plan has been thwarted by Spanish bookshops releasing the Spanish-language version of the memoir, however, with the press now awash with light write-ups of various sordid episodes in the woke royal’s life — including hard drug abuse from the age of 17.

“I was a 17-year-old willing to try almost anything that would upset the established order. At least that was what I was trying to convince myself of,” said Harry of the fact that he started doing lines of cocaine in 2002 — perhaps not aware of the fact that he still seems bent on upsetting the established order as a multi-millionaire in his late thirties.

While cocaine made him feel “different” it did not, the prince recalls, make him notably happier — but taking magic mushrooms in California while drunk of tequila had a more profound impact.

Harry recalled seeing a bathroom rubbish bin appearing to stare at him and growing a head, while a toilet turned into a head as well and began talking to him — an incident he described as “the experience of a lifetime”. He also asked the moon to change his life.

Two years later he married Meghan Markle, now Meghan, Duchess of Sussex.

Harry also revealed that he is a long-term cannabis abuser, and that he believes psychedelic drugs helped him see there is “another world where the red mist d[oesn’t] exist”.

Red mist appears to be Prince Harry’s way of discussing anger or violence, perhaps a coping mechanism developed through his use of a therapist. In the book, he describes having seen “the red mist” inside his brother Prince William during the incident in which the heir apparent physically put him into a bowl of dog food.

The effect of being able to see “another world” is said to have stuck with the prince after the drugs wore off, leaving him with a conviction that his other world is ”just as real and twice as beautiful” as the real one, which is “not all there is.”

“Only the truth existed,” Harry opined.

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2023/01/06/prince-harry-claims-magic-mushrooms-cannabis-cocaine-let-him-see-the-truth/

The Political Corruption at the Heart of Washington, DC — Follow the Money

Regardless of whether you support Ukraine or not, most honest observers concede that Ukraine is rife with corruption and political figures eager to feed at the public trough. Ukraine commonly is described as the most corrupt nation in Europe.

Well, I have bad news for President Zelensky and his fellow Ukrainians — you can’t hold a candle to the political brothel that is Washington. When I moved to the Washington, DC area in 1979 (I started off in a small townhouse in Chevy Chase, Maryland) there were no Lamborghini, Ferrari, or Bentley car dealerships. The ironically named Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Maryland was lily-white and made a practice of excluding blacks and Jews. Luxury stores like Saks Fifth Avenue were rare. That was then.

Today, the Washington, DC metropolitan area, which includes Montgomery and Prince Georges counties in Maryland and Alexandria and Arlington in Virginia, is populated with luxurious automobile dealerships and the kind of high-end retail stores normally seen on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, California or 5th Avenue in New York City. What changed?

The business of selling influence in Washington, DC went nuclear. I am not suggesting that DC was a temple of morality and frugality prior to the 1980s. There always have been lobbyists lurking around the halls of Congress passing out money and buying favors. But it started growing like a cancer during the Clinton Administration and exploded when George W. Bush came to office. The wealthy discovered they could set up 501 c3 “charitable” corporations as a great tax dodge. “Think Tanks” began to pop up, again funded by corporate interests keen on having studies published that would advance their interests.

The revolving door twirled at light speed. What is the “revolving door?” It is a term describing how Congressional staffers get jobs in a new Presidential administration or at a prominent think tank like the Brookings Institute and then move on to jobs in the media or with lobbying firms. Then there are the “Beltway Bandits,” a term coined to describe the private and public companies that clamor for U.S. Government contracts and grants. A huge portion of these are defense contractors, but there are also firms catering to the pharmaceutical, tobacco, liquor, food and health industries.

When I joined the CIA in 1985, the Agency kept most of its business in-house. There were some contractors, but they constituted a handful. That changed in the 1990s. The CIA started to outsource analysis and other functions to companies like SAIC. Just ask Edward Snowden. He spent some time with the CIA but logged more hours as a contractor.

It is money and moneyed interests that is driving the policy train in Washington, especially when it comes to the Department of Defense. Members of Congress are especially eager to line their pockets. The Gateway Pundit published a piece today reporting that members of Congress who invested in Wall Street beat the market by a wide margin in 2022

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/01/political-corruption-heart-washington-dc-follow-money/

SELLIN: China’s Reseach with Mosquitos May Lead to Using Mosquitos in a Bioweapon Delivery Platform

Mosquitos as bioweapon delivery platforms: The imminent danger posed by China’s fused military-civilian research program

China has a history of recklessness in its use of genetic engineering and the handling of dangerous microorganisms.

In a Planet of the Apes, life imitating art scenario, in 2019, Chinese scientists inserted human brain development genes into monkeys.

Leaks out of Chinese laboratories occurred in two separate incidents in April 2004, involving researchers infected with the deadly coronavirus SARS-CoV-1, responsible for the 2002-2004 first “COVID” pandemic, which also began in China.

Then, of course, China created the COVID-19 virus, which leaked from a laboratory, or, possibly, was deliberately released, causing a global pandemic and millions of deaths.

But those examples represent only the tip of the iceberg.

Everyone needs to understand that, in China, there is no difference between military and civilian research, the fusion of which was mandated in 2016 by the Chinese Communist Party as part of its Thirteenth Five-Year Plan.

When everything has dual-use potential, no research can be automatically considered benign.

In a recent Gateway Pundit article, Cullen Linebarger wrote about a South China Morning Post report that Chinese scientists conducted experiments using mosquitos to deliver vaccines.

A Chinese scientific team, led by Professor Aihua Zheng, created a new hybrid virus by combining the recently-discovered Flavivirus called Chaoyang virus, which allegedly only replicates in insects, with the human-infecting Zika virus, also a member of the Flavivirus family.

Flaviviruses are RNA viruses like COVID-19, but are far more dangerous, attacking the central nervous system. They include yellow fever, Japanese encephalitis, West Nile, dengue fever and Zika virus, which is known for infecting pregnant women and causing severe brain damage to their babies.

In Professor Aihua Zheng’ s experiments, mosquitos infected with the genetically-engineered Chaoyang-Zika virus would bite animals, producing an immune response, which would then protect the animals from Zika virus infection via anti-Zika antibodies.

If you think that sounds benevolent, think again.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/01/sellin-chinas-reseach-mosquitos-may-lead-using-mosquitos-bioweapon-delivery-platform/

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The South China Morning Post article did not mention that Professor Aihua Zheng is a close collaborator with China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA), in particular, Cheng-feng Qin of the Academy of Military Medical Sciences in Beijing.

The South China Morning Post may have also deliberately misspelled Professor Aihua Zheng’s name to throw investigators off the scent.

It is important to note that Professor Aihua Zheng was trained at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine in New York, where he studied the envelope or E-protein of another Flavivirus, the lethal dengue fever virus.

While studying the dengue fever E-protein in the United States, Professor Aihua Zheng was the beneficiary of U.S. taxpayer research support from Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

The PLA has placed a special emphasis on Flaviviruses like Zika and its envelope or E-protein, which “contains many single amino acids that affect viral neurovirulence and neuro-invasiveness” (Med J Chin PLA, Vol. 35, No. 9, September 1, 2010).

In that regard, General Rui-fu Yang together with three of his senior PLA colleagues Zhi-Kai Xu, Zhong-Tian Qi and Fu-Quan Hu wrote that the new era required a military microbiology strategy that “should strive to cultivate and bring up a team of scientific and technological talents with strong innovation ability” regarding “pathogenic substances, pathogenic mechanisms and immune mechanisms of important pathogenic microorganisms” “including the construction and management of high-level biosafety laboratories” for research related to “biological warfare” (Med J Chin PLA, Vol. 35, No. 9, September 1, 2010).

Although Flaviviruses are usually only transmitted by mosquito or other insect bites and are diseases not common in the United States, the PLA may be in the process of changing that situation.

The PLA has long had an extensive Flavivirus military-civilian research program, which uses genetic engineering to create new combination viruses such as a combined Japanese encephalitis-Zika virus and conducts “gain of function” experiments using genetic engineering, making native Zika viruses more infectious.

PLA scientists have already begun studies on possible human-to human transmission of Zika virus via intranasal inoculation of non-human primates and the transmission between animals in close proximity.

Alarmingly, the PLA has also shown a keen interest in and has conducted numerous studies on the American strain of Zika virus.

Given China’s fused military-civilian research program, mosquitos capable of carrying vaccines could, just as easily, carry bioweapons.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/01/sellin-chinas-reseach-mosquitos-may-lead-using-mosquitos-bioweapon-delivery-platform/