Iconoclasm in St. Louis: How Identity Politics Became Identity Theft

https://culturewars.com/news/iconoclasm-in-st-louis

July 11, 2020 E. Michael Jones

Note: This article is set to appear in the forthcoming July/August issue of Culture Wars magazine. Due to the events surrounding the upcoming prayer rally scheduled for July 12th, we thought it would be appropriate to release this article in advance to demystify what is essentially a religious conflict, as opposed to a racial conflict.

Karl Marx once said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce. Nothing proved the truth of Marx’s claim better than the farcical battle over the statue of St. Louis in, yes, St. Louis which followed hot on the heels of the tragedy of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

The battle over the statue began as an exercise in identity politics, and before long it degenerated into an example of identity theft. The main protagonist in this story is Umar Lee, who was born Bret Darran Lee in 1974 to a southern Presbyterian family and grew up in Florissant, Missouri just outside St. Louis. Lee may or may not be Black, which is an ideological marker based upon but independent of biological fact, because he claims, according to The Jerusalem Post that he “has two younger siblings who are half African-American.”[1]

On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown Jr., an 18-year-old Black man, was fatally shot by 28-year-old white Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the city of Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, leading to extensive rioting. After the death of Michael Brown, Lee got involved with the Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, and was arrested on two occasions and, in his words, “locked up.” After getting fired from his job as cab driver, Lee became a full-time, but little known activist. In 2015, Lee noticed that statues started coming down in St. Louis, largely because of agitation on the part of St. Louis Jews. At some point during this period, Lee made contact with Ben Paremba, an Israeli restauranteur who was “passionate” about promoting Israel and other Jewish causes. At this point Paremba was as little known to locals as Lee, but all of that changed after the Jewish press took notice of their petition to remove the statue of St. Louis and began promoting them as social justice crusaders, if you’ll pardon the term.

In a series of tweets, Lee tried to establish his position as an aggrieved Muslim, bringing up the Crusades as the cause of his grievance, but the underlying source of his complaint was inspired by a group of Jews, who were incensed that the city where they had come to study had erected a statue in honor of a king who had burned the Talmud.

Once Lee mentioned the term “anti-Semtism,” the Jewish press began carrying stories which lionized Lee as a crusader for Jewish rights. Because of his philo-Semitism, Lee soon found himself lionized in the Jewish press. Writing for the Jewish Telegraph Agency, Ben Sales described Lee as “a local activist who started the petition and also took part in a successful drive to remove a nearby Confederate monument in 2017. Lee, Sales continued, “is not Jewish but started the petition because of Louis IX’s anti-Semitism.”[2] Because Lee’s petition called St. Louis a “rabid anti-Semite” who “inspired Nazi Germany,” it began “drawing Jewish support” from St. Louis Jews like Rabbi Susan Talve, “the founding rabbi of the city’s Central Reform Congregation, who said taking it down would help advance racial justice in the United States.” According to Talve, St. Louis Jews have “been talking about that statue for a long time.” Talve then added that removing the statue would be “a very important part of reclaiming history, reclaiming the stories that have created the institutionalized racism that we are trying to unravel today. If we’re not honest about our history we will never be able to dismantle the systems of oppression that we are living under.”

>>9936241

“Susan Talve hated Cardinal Burke,” according to one Catholic familiar with the local scene. He went on to say that Burke told him that Talve had “an animosity toward me for reasons that I don’t understand.” Blinded by over 50 years of the failed experiment known as Catholic-Jewish dialogue, his eminence was evidently incapable of seeing that Talve’s animosity toward him was based on her ancestral animosity toward the Catholic Church, which he led in St. Louis at the time. Unsurprisingly, Rabbi Talve’s animosity toward the Catholic Church has turned her into an advocate of Lee’s attack on the statue.

St. Louis Catholics were determined to ignore the ethnic animosity behind the struggle. America Needs Fatima, a front group for the Brazilian cult Tradition, Family, and Property joined the fray, criticizing “limp-wristed politicians” who were giving in to “revolutionary extremists.” ANF Protest Coordinator Jose Ferraz, claimed that “American Catholics” who were “strong in their faith” were being “pushed around by anarchist revolutionaries,” but without identifying any of the actual players in the dispute.

After local activist Jim Hoft announced that a group of Catholics associated with his website Gateway Pundit was going to defend the statue, Lee issued a statement describing what he clearly knew to be a group of Catholics as “White Nationalists” along with “those on the alt-right such as those who held the infamous and tragic rally in Charlottesville.”

Hoft then responded by claiming that Lee deliberately misrepresented the Gateway Pundit rosary group as white racists: “We are Christians and Christian allies who believe we still have the freedom to practice our religion in America. We are organizing a prayer rally with Catholic and Christian men. And now we are being threatened — In America. We will not apologize for our Christianity. Not in St. Louis.”

The leader of a local rosary group, taken in by Lee’s propaganda, began to suspect that local Catholic activists at the rosary protest “might be backed by white supremacists” and warned his group off. He then retracted his first tweet after he learned that the Rosary rally was being sponsored by local activist Jim Hoft’s Gateway Pundit and TFP-America Needs Fatima. Neither group talked about the Jews. As a result, neither group was able to discuss the conflict’s most significant player. Both groups as a result became proxy warriors in an exercise in street theater which kept the true dynamics of the conflict hidden.

In his article, Sales found a local Catholic who made a valiant attempt to defend the city’s eponymous saint, only to be shot down later by Talve, who opined that “Asserting that your way is the only way I think is always wrong” with no sense that this was precisely the gist of what the local Jews and their Muslim front man were imposing on the citizens of St. Louis.

Hoft called Lee’s claim that “those on the alt-right such as those who held the infamous and tragic rally in Charlottesville,” were responsible for the demonstration defending the statue “a lie,” and added “There is no one from the Charlottesville rally or linked to the Charlottesville rally or who promoted the Charlottesville rally who will be at the prayer rally (that we know about).”

>>9936251

Lee’s determination to turn the statue battle into a racial conflict began to generate opposition from the Black community on Twitter, inspiring one observer to write “Fuck Umar Lee’s Bitch ass. He got fired for taking a company video to start racial tension. He’s white. Not Black. Sorry POS.”

By now it was obvious that the Black population of St. Louis, in spite of being dragged into Lee’s ad hoc coalition, had no dog in this fight. St. Louis, it turns out, never owned slaves. Once the racial element disappeared from the conflict, its religious dimensions began to emerge. The battle over the statue was a religious war between Catholics and Jews, in which both sides were eager to cover over the conflict’s true ethnic configuration. Both Lee and Hoft were determined to obscure the identity of their opponents as well as the identity of their backers. As one local observer put it, “Jews end up being in a win-win situation. Either Lee succeeds in toppling the statue or Hoft succeeds and becomes the gay-married, pro-Zionist hero to the local bishopless Catholics who are too fearful to organize on their own. Nowhere do Catholics, or Blacks, or Muslims get a win out of this. Being pro-Zionist on some level probably gives Hoft permission to misbehave sexually, since Jews are the authors of gay rights as a movement. It’s his way of paying them back, even though he is deeply conservative, like a typical Iowa farm boy, raised Catholic, in all other areas.”

Even after the Catholic-Jewish nature of the conflict became apparent, Lee continued to portray the pro-statue crowd as white racists. In the days leading up to the Saturday rally, Lee tweeted a picture of the blonde-haired Hoft with this text by way of explanation. “This is the guy behind the White Nationalist rally on Saturday at noon on Art Hill. This is why it’s important for us to show up at eleven. . . . Jim Hoft and the Gateway Pundit were absurdly wrong.”[3]

A few hours later, Lee tweeted: “I will never allow Nazis, racists, and White Nationalists to hold rallies in St. Louis without a response even if it’s just me.”[4] Hours later, Christine Eidson Christlieb tried to set the record straight when she tweeted “The people praying the rosary every night at the statue aren’t white nationalists. That’s just false. They are Catholics.”[5]

Ignoring Christlieb’s tweet, Lee continued to promote identity theft, tweeting on June 24 that “White Christian Nationalists and the alt-right have announced a rally on Saturday at the Louis IX statue. Please RT and share. We need to counter. Calling all Catholic and Christian Men and their Allies.” The bogus request for Catholic support when Lee knew it was Catholics who were on the other side of the protest saying their rosaries exposed the hidden grammar of Lee’s strategy, which involved denying his opponents their actual identity and turning them instead into “white nationalists,” a group which could then be deprived of their constitutional right to free speech and assembly. I discussed this ploy in my article comparing the Arbaeen march in Dearborn, which was considered legitimate because of its religious sponsorship, and the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, which was illegitimate precisely because the protesters were “white,” a designation which deprived them of any constitutional protection. Lee knew he was dealing with Catholics, but he insisted on calling them white supremacists because that was the category that would demonize them.

Lee’s tweets throughout the period leading up to the June 27 protest gave a clear indication that his real animus was against St. Louis’s Catholics, not white supremacists or nationalists. Lee tweeted “Mel Gibson is probably the most prominent traditional Catholic and critic of the modern church known to most Americans. He is also a raging anti-Semite who beat his wife. The Twitter army defending Louis IX I’m sure are huge fans of his.”

Umar Lee is not your typical Muslim. He said nothing about the plight of the Palestinians who were about to lose control over the West Bank. He failed to mention the connection between the knee hold which presumably killed George Floyd and ADL sponsored seminars which introduced Minneapolis police officers to Israeli instructors in Chicago in 2012. Instead he claimed that “Bringing down the Louis IX statue won’t be the [first] time Muslims and Jews coordinated in St. Louis to stamp out evil.” Then combining two contradictory tropes, Lee described his opponents as “alt-right Catholic fascists,” whose “favorite hobbies” were “burning and looting Jews and impaling heretics.” Instead of defending the statue of St. Louis IX, Lee felt that his Catholic foes could better spend their time studying Jewish history and volunteering “to help the many thousands of sex crimes victims in the church.”

>>9936274

Statues are a sign of hegemony. They help you identify the ruler, and if not the real ruler, the man those in power would like to have as their ruler. In a revolutionary era, the statues of the former ruling class must come down. The most striking instance of this was the statue of Stalin in Prague, which came down as soon as Communism collapsed in the period from 1989 to 1990. The removal of Stalin’s statue left an empty pedestal in its place, but just as nature abhors a vacuum, so pedestals will not remain empty. The first occupant of the empty Stalin pedestal was a statue of Michael Jackson, who brought his own statue to Prague when he played a concert there. He was the hegemon of the 1990s. The last time I was in Prague that pedestal was occupied by a weird crane-liked gnomon which moved in sync with some unheard rhythm of the spheres, making it seem like a metronome keeping time to an unknown melody.

The battle in Charlottesville in 2017 was ultimately a conflict over a statue, in this case a statue of Robert E. Lee, which celebrated the “redemption” of the South which occurred a generation after the Civil War, when the South drove the last remnant of Yankee soldiers from their soil. The Lee statue was erected, as were many others celebrating Confederate soldiers, to celebrate the new regime.

During the revolutionary spring of 2020, numerous statues were deposed. Not surprisingly, the statue of Lenin in Seattle escaped the mayhem which visited that city unscathed, as did the most recent addition to statuary in South Bend, Indiana, the statue of Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, CSC, president of Notre Dame University and civil rights icon Martin Luther King, Jr. The latter statue expresses better than any other the system of control which it symbolizes. The short-hand explanation of that system of control is the civil rights movement, which celebrates breaking laws with some higher purpose in mind. A recent article noted that 60 percent of people in their 20s believe it is okay to break the law for a good cause. Of course, who gets to determine whether the cause is good did not get mentioned in that article. That is why the Hesburgh-King statue is important. It was based on a photo taken in Chicago in 1966 (most often erroneously stated as 1964). When Martin Luther King arrived in Marquette Park, one of Chicago’s many ethnic neighborhoods, the Lithuanians living there greeted him with a hail of rocks and bottles, one of which staggered King as he got out of his car. Needing help to prosecute the ethnic cleansing of Catholic neighborhoods in Chicago, King gave Hesburgh a call and together the two icons sang “We shall overcome” at a rally at Soldier Field that summer.

The statue is, in other words, a celebration of two of American history’s most famous proxy warriors. As a pawn of Jewish money and Quaker organizing, King obliterated the traditional Black power structure in Chicago, symbolized by Bronzeville, which was the Black ethnic neighborhood. As a pawn of the Rockefellers, Hesburgh betrayed fellow Catholics in Chicago in order to get funding from their foundations, especially the Population Council run by John D. Rockefeller, 3rd. So the South Bend statue is in no danger of coming down because the descendants of the oligarchs which turned King and Hesburgh into political icons have found a new set of proxy warriors in Antifa and Black Lives Matter, who have arrogated the civil rights mantle to themselves in a bid to stamp out the last remnants of representative government in the United States. Pedestals will not remain empty. Prepare yourself for a Jeff Bezos statue. Just as King and Hesburgh were proxy warriors of the oligarchs in collaboration with each other, so Lee and Hoft are proxy warriors of the oligarchs in opposition to each other.

>>9936299

In the spring of 2015, the iconoclasts of St. Louis succeeded in getting the Jesuit-run St. Louis University to remove its statue of Pere Pierre-Jean De Smet, a Belgian Catholic priest who worked as a missionary to the Indians in the Mid-West and western sections of the United States of America.[6] The Jesuits caved in to pressure from “a cohort of students and faculty” who complained that the De Smet sculpture “symbolized white supremacy, racism, and colonialism,”[7] at least according to this news account, which and alumnus disputes, claiming:

Saint Louis University did not get rid of the statue of Father DeSmet. They moved it to the newly renovated Saint Louis University Museum of Art (SLUMA). There, the statue is prominently shown quite beautifully along with other artifacts and artwork from the early founding of St Louis and its Catholic heritage. One could argue that they removed it from its outside area because of the pressure that the university faced to remove it, but there was never a "cohort of faculty and students to remove it." During my four years as a student from 2006 to 2009, I never heard one comment about the statue. I attended the university with a lot of people from various ethnicities who never mentioned it once. We would also pass it by on a daily basis. I personally think that this "cohort" was made up and that no one ever had a problem with it, whether liberal or not. It was made into a problem by those who would like to destroy Catholicism. The Jesuits should have left it where it was but at least they had enough sense to keep it and showcase it prominently in their museum, which I will repeat, is beautiful.

Two years later, St. Louis mayor Lyda Krewson caved in to the same sort of pressure when she removed a Confederate statue from the same Forest Park neighborhood where the statue to St. Louis is located.[8] The statue of Columbus was also removed in 2017, largely at the behest of Rachel Sender, a graduate student in biological anthropology at Washington University who claimed that Columbus “represents racism, colonialism, slavery and white supremacy and should not be given any honorable remembrance or be a symbol of Tower Grove Park.”[9] In attempt to give some background on Lee and his petition, local Catholic activist Jim Hoft described Rachel Sender as “some idiot . . . from New Jersey.” Sender, however, was much more forthcoming than Hoft in describing both her identity and motivation in wrecking that city’s statues. Buoyed by the iconoclasts’ success in removing the Columbus statue, Sender jumped on the bandwagon to remove the St. Louis statue, tweeting that “St. Louis was a crusader known for persecuting Jews. This is also the only city I’ve experienced [sic] blatant anti-Semitism. His legacy should not be honored! Lyda Kewson, City of St. Louis, Change the name of St. Louis. Sign the petition.”[10]

Lee was lionized in the Jewish press because even though Lee calls himself a Muslim, he not only talks like a Jew, he also got the idea of tearing down the St. Louis statue from Jews. In a recent interview, Lee told The Jerusalem Post “that he became aware of the statue’s history when Rabbi Hershey Novack of the Chabad on the Campus at St. Louis University held a Tisha B’Av gathering by the Louis IX statue to remember the atrocities he wrought on Jews in France.”[11] Lee was in effect only doing what he was told, after Novack and local Israeli restauranteur Ben Parembo said, “Hey, that statue needs to come down. Jewish kids going out with their parents to [park’s] [sic] art museum don’t need to be looking at this anti-Semite.”

>>9936311

Lee may be the only Muslim in the world who is not upset about the United States moving its embassy to Jerusalem, thereby making it the capital of Israel. In fact he’s planning a trip to Jerusalem, where he plans to “do a little dance. . . to commemorate the fact that loser [i.e., St. Louis IX] never made it to Jerusalem.” In the meantime, Lee “will be drafting a letter to @Pontifex asking for the decanonization of King Louis IX.” On June 21, Lee informed his twitter followers that he was “working on Lindbergh too. Must go. No Nazi named streets in St. Louis Couny [sic]!” In addition to being a descendant of Robert E. Lee, Umar Lee did time for some unspecified crime. It was during his stay in prison that he became aware of Jewish history and the fact that St. Louis “burned Talmuds and embarked upon two crusades.” He also learned that St. Louis was “a Catholic town,” a fact which led him to embark on a career as a reformer of the Catholic Church, forcing him to oppose “some hateful pre-Vatican II trends that are being repopularized.” At some point during his study of Jewish history, Lee discovered that “a group of Jewish students from Washington University and a rabbi gathered at the statue [of St. Louis] on Tisha B’av” [or this ninth of Av, the day on which the temple was destroyed].[12] From reading the article, Lee also learned that King Louis “organized the burning of 12,000 Jewish manuscripts in Paris, reasoning that the Jewish manuscripts might corrupt his good Christian soldiers.”[13] The book burning was small potatoes compared to the destruction of the Temple, but the statue gave local Jews a reason to feel aggrieved and test the local political waters to see how much clout they had. Lee discovered that Jewish clout had increased considerably over the past 11 years, and that, during the revolutionary spring of 2020, the time was ripe to press the issue.

Knowing that the Jews were itching for a battle with that city’s Catholics, Lee engaged in identity theft by claiming that the Catholic protesters were white because religion was a category which still afforded constitutional protection. Recognizing that any conflict between Catholics and Jews, with Muslims and Blacks playing minor roles, was unwinnable, Lee attempted to drag the mayor into a fight against “white nationalists” knowing full well that enlisting her in a battle against that city’s Catholics, a group which made up 26 percent of the population would have meant political suicide. Hence, Lee’s persistent efforts to turn the rally into something which it was not, as when he wrote: “Does St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson have a problem with alt-right White Nationalists having a protest at the Louis IX statue on Art Hill this Saturday?” Lee’s tendentious formulation of the issue bespoke a combination of identity theft and moral blackmail. The two issues are, of course, related and the link was America’s Civic Religion, otherwise known as the Civil Rights Movement, otherwise known as the Black-Jewish alliance. Anyone who had the Black-Jewish alliance on his side occupied the high moral ground and was on his way to winning the argument by default, because his opponents lacked a moral leg to stand on. Because of Hollywood and public education, support for the Civil Rights movement had replaced the ten commandments in America’s mind as the source of moral guidance.

But, as Anne Hendershott pointed out in her book The Politics of Deviance, deviance is constant. That means that for every precept of the moral law you subtract from your behavior, you have to add a precept of political correctness by way of compensation. Sexual sin is the usual motivation for subtracting precepts of the moral law from your conscience. The public school system in America as well as higher education has as one of its main goals the sexual corruption of every student unfortunate enough to enter its doors. The moral vacuum that education creates is filled by tales of the Civil Rights Movement, which proposes Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks as role models. The sense of grievance and contempt for the positive law which King and Parks stoked found fulfillment in the homosexual movement which invoked their name to stoke contempt for the natural law.

So one way to calm your conscience because of the abortion you had is by becoming a fanatical member of Antifa or a supporter of Black Lives Matter. The Civil Rights Movement of the '60s was in many ways moral compensation for the adoption of contraception among Protestant sects. Unsurprisingly, 1964 was the year of both the pill and the Civil Rights Act. This is not a coincidence.

>>9936317

The battle over the statue served as an update on the Triple Melting Pot. Protestants were nowhere to be found in this conflict. Their place had been taken by Muslims, who were still negligible in terms of political power or cultural presence, but they could become significant if they allied themselves with the Jews, the part of the Triple Melting Pot which was still negligible in terms of numbers but whose cultural and political power had increased enormously over the past half century. St. Louis is the home to 60,000 Bosnian Muslims, who harbor animus against Jews that is now common in the Islamic world, largely because of how Israel has treated Palestinians. Umar Lee is the exception that proves the rule. Thanks to the state of Israel, Muslim antipathy to Jews is a widespread phenomenon, but it is not the case in the drama surrounding the state of St. Louis. If Umar had come out in favor of the Boycott Divestment and Sanction movement holding Israel accountable for its crimes against Palestinians, he’d still be driving a cab.

What began as an exercise in identity politics soon devolved into a case of identity theft. After Lee called the Catholics white nationalists, local Catholic activist Jim Hoft responded by calling Lee’s Jewish coalition “Marxists.” When it came to the battle of the St. Louis statue, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church was missing in action. Archbishop Robert Carlson, ordinary of the archdiocese of St. Louis, defended the statue, but his comments had little effect on public opinion because he is on his way out the door. His appointed successor, auxiliary bishop Mitchell Rozanski of Springfield, Massachusetts, had nothing to say on the issue. As a result, Hoft became defensor fidei by default, in spite of the fact that Jim Hoft’s relationship with Catholicism is even more troubled that Umar Lee’s relationship with Islam.

Hoft was born and raised in Iowa, but he got his start in local politics in St. Louis after he established a national internet presence by founding the Gateway Pundit website, which took the typically conservative line on issues as other websites began to engage in liberal waffling. Conservative, at this moment in time, had less to do with the Republican populism of St. Louis native Phyllis Schlafly, and more to do with the Neoconservatives who took over both the party and the movement over the course of the 1990s. Specifically, that meant that Hoft was rabidly pro-Israel, even to the point of posting a picture of him and Bibi Netanyahu on the Gateway Pundit masthead, and disallowing any criticism of Israel or Jews from its combox. Hoft’s loyalty to Israel has earned him Jewish friends, such as film producer Michael Rudin, who featured Hoft in a 2019 episode of the TV Series The Conspiracy Files and who is also featured in Hoft's masthead.

In keeping with an even more recent trend in Republican-style conservatism, Hoft announced that he was a homosexual after the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando because he “just had to.” Not long after coming out of the closet, Hoft married a gay Filipino in what purported to be a Catholic ceremony at the rebel St. Stanislaus Church in St. Louis. Not content to keep his sodomy private, Hoft took out an elaborate wedding announcement complete with picture of him and the boy, who is about a foot shorter than Hoft.

Hoft’s Gateway Pundit has gone on to become a fact-checker’s dream, with article after article in mainstream outlets like the Washington Post describing Hoft and his website as retailers of conspiracy theories and fake news, but Hoft continues in his role as the Jews’ favorite dumb goy. Hoft’s fanatical, pro-Israel chest-thumping Catholicism is a compensation for homosexuality, and a manifestation of what we might call the Michael Voris syndrome. In addition to being useful to the Jews whenever they need someone to make the Catholic Church in St. Louis look ridiculous, Hoft has become defensor fidei by default because in St. Louis, as elsewhere, nature abhors a vacuum. Archbishop Robert Carlson’s defense of the statue was weakened by his status as a lame duck.[14] The Archdiocese issued a statement defending St. Louis as “an example of an imperfect man who strived to live a life modeled after the life of Jesus Christ” and a “model for how we should care for our fellow citizen.” His defense was further weakened by the fact that he did not identify the group responsible for wanting the statue removed. Catholics, as a result, were once more engaged in cultural shadow boxing against enemies they could not identify.

That means that the fate of the statue rests in the hands of Carlson’s successor, Archbishop-elect Mitchell Rozanski, who will be installed as St. Louis’s new ordinary on August 25, which is, not coincidentally, the feast of St. Louis IX. The fate of the statue rests of Mayor Lyda Krewson, who is both a Catholic and a liberal Democrat, which means she is pulled in two opposite directions. She has come out in favor of retaining the statue, but some Catholics are not sure she can withstand the political pressure pulling her in the opposite direction, since she has already presided over other acts of public iconoclasm. As a Catholic mayor presiding over the fate of the statue of a Catholic saint in a city with a large Catholic population, Krewson finds herself confronted with a revolutionary situation during an interregnum. The driving force behind that revolution is the Jewish revolutionary spirit. Because of that fact, the impending arrival of Mitchell Rozanski is not cause for optimism. Rozanski grew up in Baltimore and is a protégé of Cardinal Keeler, who is the patron saint of Catholic-Jewish dialogue in the United States and author of a document on Catholic-Jewish relations that was so heretical that even the notoriously philosemitic United States Conference of Catholic Bishops refused to publish it. On June 18, 2009, the USCCB took the unprecedented step of condemning its own document on Catholic-Jewish relations, warning unsuspecting readers that Keeler’s “Reflections on Covenant and Mission should not be taken as an authoritative presentation of the teaching of the Catholic Church. In order to avoid any confusion, the USCCB Committee on Doctrine and the Committee on Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs have decided to point out some of these ambiguities and to offer corresponding clarifications.”[15]

In an interview with Rozanski which appeared in the National Catholic Reporter, Keeler was described as “a legend in the field of Jewish-Catholic dialogue” and “one of Rozanski’s mentors.”[16] Eventually Rozanski succeeded Keeler as moderator for Catholic-Jewish relations. On February 24, 2017, Rozanski wrote a response to the shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in his capacity as U.S. Bishops’ Chairman on Interreligious Affairs, expressing “deep sympathy, solidarity, and support to our Jewish brothers and sisters who have experienced once again a surge of anti-Semitic actions in the United States. I wish to offer our deepest concern, as well as our unequivocal rejection of these hateful actions. The Catholic Church stands in love with the Jewish community in the current face of anti-Semitism.”[17]

In an article which appeared in the Springfield, Massachusetts Republican, Rozanski was quoted as saying, "I fear that the current level of demonizing anyone of a different opinion sadly will only lead to even more levels of violence and affronts to our fellow human beings, created in the likeness and image of God.”[18] The article went on to say that the suspected shooter in the attack referred to Jews as “children of Satan,” which the paper described as an “anti-Semitic social media posting” with no indication that the term came from Jesus Christ in a confrontation with the Jews portrayed in the Gospel of St. John. I make the claim that there is a historical continuity between that confrontation in the Gospel and 2,000 years of revolutionary ferment on the part of the Jews in my book The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit.

Unlike Justin Rigali and Raymond Burke, “whose legacies remain divisive,” Rozanski plans to deal with the polarized situation in St. Louis by promoting “more dialogue, more understanding, more study of the way that police deal with different situations. And what happened to George Floyd in Minneapolis was totally, totally unacceptable, totally beyond the pale of whatever should be done to anyone who is being taken into police custody.”

>>9936356

There are, of course, Catholics in St. Louis who can provide a cogent defense of retaining the statue, but they are currently in hiding, fearing repercussions from Rozanski, whom one “local Catholic in a very sensitive position that requires him to remain anonymous” described as their “new super-ecumenical and politically correct Archbishop.” As I have said many times before, the Church can have good relations with the Jews, or she can have unity, but she can’t have both. Rozanski’s good relations with the Jews is a sign that local Catholics are in for a hard time if they try to contest the anti-Semitism label which has been imposed on them by Umar Lee and his Jewish backers in their defense of the statue. One such Catholic provided the following defense of the statue, while at the same time declining to give his name:

Saint Louis IX was a devout follower of Jesus, who was scrupulously honest, humble, a generous and unfailing lover and benefactor of the poor, and a peacemaker and unifier of factions within his kingdom. It is for these and other virtues that he was canonized by the Church. Just as we don't eliminate the name and statues of Martin Luther King because he was a womanizer and a plagiarist, nor should we dishonor St. Louis because of his policies toward Jews and his crusading ventures. These need to be understood in their historical context of medieval Christendom - very different from today's secularized world. We're told his statue is “offensive” to Jews and Muslims. Tearing it down would be deeply offensive to hundreds of thousands of Catholics in this area, and to quite a few others as well.

As the intensity of the conflict surrounding the rosary vigils increased, the author of the above statement began to wonder if it had been strong enough in stating the case for St. Louis. When a local priest attempted to debate with the protestors, a shouting match ensued with no conclusive outcome. The author then brought up the issue of the Crusades by contexualizing it with a discussion of Zionism:

It’s a pity the priest leading the rosary and the other Catholics there didn't defend St. Louis from the charge of being “genocidal” and a “murderer.” The Crusades were basically a defensive movement against constant Muslim encroachment on the west and Christendom, which they vowed to conquer and destroy, and to regain the Holy Places in Palestine which they had seized after the Holy Land had been under Christian control for over three centuries before the Muslim invasions of the 7th century. What prompted King Louis to embark on a crusade was that in 1244 Muslim forces invaded Jerusalem, massacred many Christians there and desecrated churches and holy places. So it wasn't "Islamophobic" or "genocidal" for a Christian king to want to defend them! How can Jews condemn Christians for seeking to reclaim lands formerly under Christian control when they themselves (or at least the great majority, who are Zionists) justified their takeover of Palestine in 1948 for the same reason, namely, that it belonged to their ancestors until foreigners (the Romans) conquered it and dispersed them?

He then addressed the issue of burning the Talmud:

St. Louis was following the precepts of Lateran Council IV and the popes of his time in having copies of the Talmud banned and burned after it was found out that this volume (only then recently translated from Hebrew) contained repulsive blasphemies against Jesus and the Blessed Mother. Regarding Mary, “She who was the descendant of princes and governors played the harlot with carpenters” (Sanhedrin, 106a). As regards Our Lord himself, he is said to be now in hell, being boiled in “hot excrement” (Gittin, 57a). Why? “Jesus the Nazarene . . . and his disciples practiced sorcery and black magic, [and] led Jews astray into idolatry” (Sanhedrin, 43a). “He was sexually immoral, worshipped statues of stone. . . was cut off from the Jewish people for his wickedness, and refused to repent” (Sanhedrin 107b, Sotah, 47a). He “learned witchcraft in Egypt” (Shabbos, 104b).[19]

>>9936361

Missing from this discussion is the role Jews play in getting people they don’t like de-platformed from social media, which is the modern day equivalent of burning the Talmud. On the same Saturday as the protests at the St. Louis statue, all of my books were removed from Amazon at the behest of the ADL, the main organization promoting Jewish censorship of the media. Unlike the ADL, the Inquisition gave the books it burned a fair hearing. Now, because of Jewish concepts like “hate speech,” anyone can lose his livelihood without trial or explanation at the hands of the same people who take umbrage at burning the Talmud. The only thing necessary is mention of the magic word “anti-Semitism,” which ends all discussion and leaves the accused person guilty without any possibility of clearing his name. St. Louis, according to our author:

was no “anti-Semite” (which properly speaking is a racial prejudice, like that of Hitler); but he was indeed anti-Jewish, i.e., against Judaism as a religion, for the reason that Jews bitterly hated Christianity (as the Talmud demonstrated) and often worked to undermine the faith of Louis' Christian subjects, whose eternal salvation he sought to protect. The consistent position taken by the medieval popes was the Jews were not to be molested, and their worship was to be tolerated, provided they didn't work to oppose or undermine the faith of the Christian majority. When punitive measures were implemented or authorized by the Church, it was because the Church judged that Jews were not abiding by that condition.

As his final point, our author points out that if the Jews had power over Christians to implement the Talmud which St. Louis ordered burned, Christians would have died. That’s because Jews only believe in tolerance when they are a powerless minority, and they believe in it only as a strategy to undermine the coherence and unity of the dominant culture until they get the upper hand, at which point they become ruthless persecutors of those who are weaker than they are. Israeli treatment of Palestinians is a good indication of how Jews act when they get the upper hand. Bolshevism in Russia is another example. Once the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, the Jews who controlled that movement turned the instruments of state power against the Russian Christians whom they saw as their ancestral foes by creating instruments of terror like the Cheka, which was invariably a Jewish-run operation because Russians were reluctant to torture and murder other Russians, whereas the Jews who made up the majority of that organization had no such compunction. “St. Louis’s medieval methods,” our author continues:

were not such as we would find acceptable today, when a much greater degree of religious toleration and emphasis on individual rights has been a part of Western culture now for centuries; but we have to understand St. Louis and other great figures of Christendom and U.S. history in their own historical context. The idea of a religiously “neutral” or secular state was unheard of anywhere in the world until after the French and American Revolutions more than 500 years after St. Louis lived. No religion in those days gave much emphasis to religious toleration. The Jews themselves (never mind the Muslims!) would have been very oppressive to Christians if they had been in power, as the Jewish laws set out in the Babylonian Talmud make clear, even though most of them couldn't be implemented. For instance, “If a gentile hits a Jew, the gentile must be killed” (Sanhedrin, 58b); “When a Jew murders a gentile there will be no death penalty. What a Jew steals from a gentile he may keep” (Sanhedrin, 57a). Indeed, gentiles are dehumanized: “All gentile children are animals” (Yebamoth 98a); “Gentile girls are in a state of niddah [filth] from birth” (Abodah Zarah, 36b). If this, and the vitriolic Talmud slurs against Jesus and Mary cited above, are not "hate speech," what is?"

>>9936367

As some indication of the parlous state which Catholic-Jewish dialogue has created in the Catholic Church, America Magazine turned to a Jewish Lesbian convert to Catholicism, who explained the situation in St. Louis to its readers in the following way: “King Louis IX, whom Catholics know as St. Louis, ordered the burning [of the Talmud] after a rigged ‘disputation’ in which a Jewish convert to Christianity debated a rabbi about whether the Talmud was blasphemous.”[20] So are the above passages blasphemous? Are they in the Talmud? If the answer to those questions is yes, in what sense was the disputation rigged? Eve Tushnet, who is the author of this article as well as the author of Gay and Catholic: Accepting My Sexuality, Finding Community, Living My Faith, never gets around to answering that question. Nor does she tell us whether the statue should be taken down or left in place, nor does she tell us in what sense someone who describes herself as a Jewish lesbian has converted to the Catholic faith.

The fact that the author of this eloquent defense of St. Louis chose to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation from that city’s incoming bishop is a good indication that the violence will increase. America is now in the middle of a full-blown revolution because largely Jewish revolutionaries broke the Motion Picture Production Code in 1965 and inundated the country with pornography and other forms of sexual subversion, which left subsequent generations weakened, demoralized, and incapable of sustaining their own culture and institutions. The year 1965 inaugurated the failed experiment known as Catholic-Jewish dialogue as well. More than anything else, the sort of Catholic-Jewish dialogue which the incoming bishop learned at the knee of his mentor Cardinal Keeler crippled the Catholic Church’s ability to defend the moral order in American society. Repurposed as our “elder brothers” and friends, Jews qua Jews became the unopposed sponsors of virtually every subversive movement in American culture from abortion to gay marriage, from race-baiting political correctness to family destroying feminism, from warmongering neo-Conservatism to brutal shoot-the-protesters-in-the-back Zionism, alienating people who should have been America’s friends because of Israel’s barbarous behavior. The Jews have never abandoned their ancestral commitment to revolution, and now revolution has arrived at the gates of the Gateway, as the Black revolutionaries who have always been the Jews’ proxy warriors, from the founding of the NAACP to the infusion of George Soros money into the coffers of Black Lives Matter, broke down the entrance to a gated community two blocks from the St. Louis statue and continued the march which began after George Floyd died. Threatened by what looked like a home invasion and abandoned by the local police, who had been told to stand down by that city’s feminist mayor, Mr. and Mrs. McCloskey stood their ground on the front porch of their house brandishing the weapons that they were forced to exhibit because the cops refused to come to their assistance when called.

The rally at the statue ended up being much more violent than anticipated as brass-knuckled Black Lives Matter thugs beat up elderly Catholics who had come to say the Rosary.[21] Some of the Black Lives Matter demonstrators arrived with firearms. All of the Catholic demonstrators were unarmed. According to various reports, Black Lives Matter protesters attacked Catholics praying near the Apotheosis of St. Louis statue in St. Louis. And why did they do this? Were the Black thugs who took the cane away from a 60-year-old Catholic praying the Rosary and beat him with it upset about Louis IX burning the Talmud or his position on Albigensianism? I doubt it. You can view that attack at the link in this footnote.[22] Umar Lee’s portrayal of Catholics as white supremacists, fresh from Charlottesville, is responsible for that Catholic’s injuries. Lee is guilty of incitement. If he and the man who carried out the attack go unpunished, we can expect more violence.

>>9936378

In reaction to the violence at the statue on Sunday, the Islamic Foundation of Greater St. Louis issued a stunning rebuke to Umar Lee in a statement on Tuesday, June 31, saying that removing the statue of St. Louis “will not erase history.” The Islamic group went on to say that they remained “committed to work on interfaith relationships based on honest dialogue and mutual respect.” It did not recommend taking down the statue of St. Louis. Instead it was saying there were voices of reason in the Islamic community in St. Louis and that Lee’s campaign had no support among the people who did speak for Islam in that city. As one local Catholic put it after reading the Islamic group’s report, “The Jews have overplayed their hand.”

Mr. Greenblatt’s attempt to use the ADL to resurrect the Black/Jewish alliance has created problems of its own. With Israel’s annexation of the West Bank looming, the ADL is concerned that the backlash that the annexation is sure to cause, might spread to its proxy warriors in Black Lives Matter, as in fact did happen in England[23]:

The “stakeholders analysis memo,” which was issued by the ADL’s Government Relations, Advocacy, and Community Engagement department and marked as a draft, warns that the group will need to find a way to defend Israel from criticism without alienating other civil rights organizations, elected officials of color, and Black Lives Matter activists and supporters. The memo suggests that the group hopes to avoid appearing openly hostile to public criticism of annexation while it works to block legislation that harshly censures Israel or leads to material consequences, such as conditioning United States military support.[24]

The ADL was not the only Jewish organization supporting Black Lives Matter. According to a a report in the Jewish Telegraph Agency, “More than 400 Jewish organizations and synagogues in the United States have signed on to a letter that asserts ‘unequivocally: Black Lives Matter.’”[25] Those groups represented a broad spectrum “of religious, political, gender, and racial identities. The list of signatories — from small congregations to major Jewish organizations — represents millions of Jewish people in the United States, the organizers,” according to the statement.

The problem in cities like Seattle, Chicago, and St. Louis can be laid at the feet of those cities’ lesbian and feminist public officials, a group which is incapable of enforcing the law because they see the law as a manifestation of patriarchal oppression. This encourages anarchy because it allows Jewish-funded thugs like Antifa and Black Lives Matter to act with impunity. It also encourages political opportunists like Umar Lee to mount assaults on the social order because they can blackmail those officials because of the guilty conscience which arises from abortion and sexual perversion. The Church is complicit as well when it appoints bishops who are known for their skill in appeasing Christ's enemies.

The video of Mr. and Mrs. McCloskey’s confrontation in St. Louis garnered over 16 million views in less than 24 hours, not because violence ensued, but because violence was averted, at least for the time being.[26] But the assault on the McCloskeys continues as a signature petition to disbar them is wending its way to the Jewish head of the local lawyer’s disciplinary board. Planning to fight fire with fire, the McCloskeys have hired a Jewish lawyer to defend them.

>>9936385

As of this writing, St. Louis Circuit attorney Kim Gardner is considering filing charges against the McCloskey’s for defending their home. Gardner was elected in 2017, with the help of George Soros money.[27] In addition to supporting Gardner, Soros also funded the Ferguson riots.[28] During Gardner’s tenure as Circuit Attorney, felony prosecutions dropped dramatically. Of the 7,045 felony cases which the St. Louis Police Department brought before the circuit attorney in 2019, only 1641 were prosecuted, despite claims of significant evidence to prosecute presented by the police union.[29] After reducing the cash bond for numerous offences, or removing it altogether, Gardner announced that she was no longer going to prosecute “low-level” marijuana possession cases. At this point, Gardner declared war on the State of Missouri. In February 2018, Gardner indicted Missouri Governor Eric Greitens.[30] Three months later, the governor’s office filed a suit against William Don Tisaby, the ex-FBI agent Gardner had hired to investigate Greitens. Gardner then went all the way to the Missouri Supreme Court to block the appointment of a special prosecute to investigate her handling of the Greitens investigation but lost. That grand jury also brought charges of misconduct against Gardner but ultimately failed to hand down any indictments.

In 2019 Gardner pleaded guilty to repeated campaign finance violations dating back to her time as a Missouri State Legislator, but avoided conviction by reaching “an agreement with the Missouri Ethics Commission to pay a settlement of $6,314 in lieu of a $63,009 fine.”[31]

In January 2020, Gardner filed a civil rights lawsuit against St. Louis City and St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department on the basis of the Fourth Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1865 alleging a racist conspiracy. The City of St. Louis called the case “meritless,” and Jeff Roorda of the St. Louis Police Officers Association called it “the last act of a desperate woman.”[32]

On June 3, 2020, Gardner released all 36 of the rioters who had been arrested in the wake of the George Floyd protests.[33] Gardner is sympathetic St. Louis’s revolutionaries because ever since her election, she has been involved in her own attempt to overthrow the government. The fate of the McCloskeys, who have been told that the rioters are planning to return to their house, now rests in the hand of this woman and the police force she has beaten into submission with the help of George Soros.

Whether violence prevails in the future, no one can say at this point, but the best indication of its likelihood can be found in the fate of the statue which represents that city’s patron saint, and the fighting spirit it inspires in those who are determined to resist the Jewish revolutionary spirit, as St. Louis did in Paris eight centuries ago.

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