FROM THE MOST RECENT ARMY SLIDE PRESENTATION:
Posted on 06/20/2013 7:57:47 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Barack Obama actually made this claim at a speech in Belfast on Monday, but it seems to be gaining traction overnight. His claim, aimed at both Catholic and Protestant “schools and buildings,” came in prepared remarks rather than an extemporaneous response to a question. The Scottish Catholic Observer quotes the argument accurately:
The US President has made an alarming call for an end to Catholic education in Northern Ireland in spite of the fact that Archbishop Gerhard Müller told Scots that Catholic education was ‘a critical component of the Church.’
President Barack Obama (above), repeated the oft disproved claim that Catholic education increases division in front of an audience of 2000 young people, including many Catholics, at Belfast’s Waterfront hall when he arrived in the country this morning.
“If towns remain divided—if Catholics have their schools and buildings and Protestants have theirs, if we can’t see ourselves in one another and fear or resentment are allowed to harden—that too encourages division and discourages cooperation,” the US president said.
The US politician made the unfounded claim despite a top Vatican official spelling out the undeniable good done by Catholic education in a speech in Glasgow on Saturday and in his homily at Mass on Friday.
I’ll quote the passage in its full context:
We need you to get this right. And what’s more, you set an example for those who seek a peace of their own. Because beyond these shores, right now, in scattered corners of the world, there are people living in the grip of conflict — ethnic conflict, religious conflict, tribal conflicts — and they know something better is out there. And they’re groping to find a way to discover how to move beyond the heavy hand of history, to put aside the violence. They’re studying what you’re doing. And they’re wondering, perhaps if Northern Ireland can achieve peace, we can, too. You’re their blueprint to follow. You’re their proof of what is possible — because hope is contagious. They’re watching to see what you do next.
Now, some of that is up to your leaders. As someone who knows firsthand how politics can encourage division and discourage cooperation, I admire the Northern Ireland Executive and the Northern Ireland Assembly all the more for making power-sharing work. That’s not easy to do. It requires compromise, and it requires absorbing some pain from your own side. I applaud them for taking responsibility for law enforcement and for justice, and I commend their effort to “Building a United Community” — important next steps along your transformational journey.
Because issues like segregated schools and housing, lack of jobs and opportunity — symbols of history that are a source of pride for some and pain for others — these are not tangential to peace; they’re essential to it. If towns remain divided — if Catholics have their schools and buildings, and Protestants have theirs — if we can’t see ourselves in one another, if fear or resentment are allowed to harden, that encourages division. It discourages cooperation.
Ultimately, peace is just not about politics. It’s about attitudes; about a sense of empathy; about breaking down the divisions that we create for ourselves in our own minds and our own hearts that don’t exist in any objective reality, but that we carry with us generation after generation.
Does that make the context any better? Er … not really. He’s speaking in terms of Northern Ireland, but pretty explicitly calling for that to be a model for the rest of the world. His argument makes two very large assumptions, which is that the conflict in Northern Ireland was about religion, and that parochial schools make people inclined to violence. The first is a gross oversimplification; the conflict in recent times was political, dealing with ethnic conflict and sovereignty issues, with religion used more for tribal identification than a core of the conflict.
The second is just absurd. Catholics and Protestants have thousands of schools in the US, and we don’t have warfare in the streets in the US between the sects. The issue wasn’t the schools, nor the belief systems of Catholics and Protestants that such schools teach. However, this makes a handy mechanism to call for the displacement of private education and religious instruction from education, with nothing left except state-controlled schools that indoctrinate children into whatever norms the governing/ruling class deem acceptable.
My friend Father Z wonders whether Obama will make this call truly consistent:
Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a foreign visit to a Islamic nation where he told people on his arrival that they shouldn’t have madrasas. Can you?
Did he when visiting, say, Israel, say “You Jews shouldn’t have synagogue schools and you muslims shouldn’t have mosque schools.” I can’t remember. Did he?
I’d guess … no.
Update: The comments came in a speech on Monday, not on Friday. I’ve fixed it above; thanks to Joel Pollak at Breitbart for the heads-up.
WHAT DID YOU EXPECT ? This address to the Irish might make it to the national scene but our media will sit on it.
The Democrat party after taking complete control even since losing the House had the word and any reference to GOD was removed at their 2012 national convention. A fact that went un-noticed and un-touched by the RINOS and GOPES (GOP elite snobs) who are running todays Republican party.
Even after reconsideration the decision was derided by the majority because it was re-installed over a majority voice vote supporting the removal.
If this were a political party in a parlimentary system it would be hyphenated and would (and should despite the difference) be refered to as the Demo-Com party. But the RINOS and GOPES can’t even call them “socialist”.
Any Catholic or Christian claiming to belong to this party is a hyprocrite and should be confronted with disgust and distain and isloated like the lepers they are.
No, religious schools (at least Christian religious schools) teach love for God and love for all of His created creatures.
You’re confusing Christian religious schools with your Muslim religious schools...
Expect no less from a muzzie. It is TIME. We need leaders...
Obama's main job is to travel around reading rabble-rousing speeches written by his racist speechwriters who display very little knowledge about their subject matter.
They load his speeches with half-truths, manufactured statistics, imaginary stereotypes, dog-whistles and racist dribble, calculated to keep the fires of resentment and hatred stoked and burning.
As the old adage goes: "It's not that Obama doesn't know anything, It's that everything he knows is wrong."
The irony is that in America, Catholic schools have increasingly accepted non-Catholic, minority and immigrant students, usually with reduced tuition or no tuition at all.
Today, the local Catholic school probably has almost as many blacks and non-catholic students as Caucasian catholics.
Incredible. The audacity of Dopey.
do ivy league prep schools also do the same Mr fairy pants as I seem to recall you stopped vouchers, you send your kids to a nice expensive school and you certainly did not go with out either based on your politics and being not all white.
Madrassas too?
Amazing how one person can be wrong on every single issue.
Presumably not.
According to the liberal mindset, Christianity is inherently divisive; whereas Islam is the religion of peace...
>> FROM THE MOST RECENT ARMY SLIDE PRESENTATION:
What group of shitheads put those slides together?
What a piece of work this country elected to lead it.... half the country is just as clueless.
The Founders had a different idea, Barack. They believed in free exercise of religion, in free speech, and government NON-involvement in that area at all. They wanted bitter, control freaks like you to just shut up.
They figured a nation of adults could remain far freer by just letting everyone speak their mind and listens just having to put up with it, than having a government come along and tell everyone how to think about and practice their religion.
It is Obama who is here advocating government telling Catholics and Protestants how to run their religion, and not Catholics and Protestants telling each other. And their problems come straight out of an era when the British government was the Big Brother insisting that religion be done their way.
What this means for us is what we already know: Obama doesn't have a clue what the first amendment means, and he really seems to have Christianity stuck in his craw.
"Extremist Organizations: A group which advocates the use of force or violence"
As there are no qualifiers as to motivation or purpose that category, by definitiion, would include the US Government, most of its 3 letter bureaucracies (ATF, IRS etc.) the entire US military and every SWAT team in the nation.
And multiplication, and higher math, and reading and writing, and history, and all the other basics that public education used to encourage before the hippies took over.
I smell blatant violations of the Constitution.
What about the elite private schools his daughters attend? Do they cause division? why not mingle with the commoners?
Summer Vacation...
RE: What group of shitheads put those slides together?
SOURCE:
EXCERPT:
A U.S. Army Reserve Equal Opportunity training brief describes “Evangelical Christianity” and “Catholicism” as examples of “religious extremism,” according to the Archdiocese for the Military Services and the Chaplain Alliance for Religious Liberty, who shared a copy of the documents with The Christian Post.
“The number of hate groups, extremists and anti-govt organizations in the U.S. has continued to grow over the past three years, according to reports by the Southern Poverty Law Center. They increased to 1,018 in 2011, up from 1,002 in 2010 and 602 in 2000,” reads the first page of the slide presentation labeled “Extremism & Extremist Organizations.”
Listed alongside “extremist” groups and organizations like the Klu Klux Klan and al-Qaida, the U.S. Army slideshow has “Evangelical Christianity” as the first bullet, followed by the Muslim Brotherhood, Ultra-Orthodox Judaism and farther down on the slide, Catholicism.
According to the training documents, “Extremism is a complex phenomenon” that is present in every religion due to “some followers that believe that their beliefs, customs and traditions are the only ‘right way’ and that all others are practicing their faith the ‘wrong way,’ seeing and believing that their faith/religion superior to all others.”
My jaw dropped when I read Obama’s comments about Catholic schools creating divisiveness. Does he even understand that one does not have to be Catholic to attend a Catholic school? The Catholic schools have saved numerous students from the urban decay called public education, and to want to throw these kids into the waste land created by the teachers’ unions in a misguided attempt to cleanse the culture of all religious differences is something I’d expect to hear out of Joseph Stalin or Pol Pot or Mao Tse-tung.
Obama never ceases to amaze me.
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