Pope Francis Embraces Naomi Klein

Think what you will about Pope Francis’s foray into climate change politics, he is making no effort to appear to be fair and balanced.

Having already resurrected the South American radical leftist doctrine of liberation theology—an unholy amalgam of Catholicism and Marx—he has now chosen extreme leftist firebrand Naomi Klein to co-chair this Friday’s Vatican conference on climate change.

The Guardian reports:

She is one of the world’s most high-profile social activists and a ferocious critic of 21st-century capitalism. He is one of the pope’s most senior aides and a professor of climate change economics. But this week the secular radical will join forces with the Catholic cardinal in the latest move by Pope Francis to shift the debate on global warming.

Naomi Klein and Cardinal Peter Turkson are to lead a high-level conference on the environment, bringing together churchmen, scientists and activists to debate climate change action. Klein, who campaigns for an overhaul of the global financial system to tackle climate change, told the Observer she was surprised but delighted to receive the invitation from Turkson’s office.

At a time when the horrors of Communism cannot be denied, Klein continues to wage war against capitalism. Communism may have murdered around 100 million people and destroyed the lives of many, many more, but Klein refuses to accept reality. She has decided that capitalism will destroy everyone and everything because it has made it impossible to combat global climate change.

Otherwise she would have to admit that she and her fellow-travelers were grievously wrong, and people like Klein are constitutionally incapable of doing so.

For example:

Indeed, the three pillars of the neoliberal age—privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and the lowering of income and corporate taxes, paid for with cuts to public spending—are each incompatible with many of the actions we need to take to bring our emissions to safe levels. And together these pillars form an ideological wall that has blocked a serious response to climate change for decades.

One ought not to have to say it, but in the post Mao era in China privatization succeeded in feeding hundreds of millions of people and raising nearly a billion people out of abject poverty. So naturally, Klein wants to return to Communism.

Among her other pronouncements, Klein attacked the Iraq war as an effort to bring capitalism to Iraq. As Wikipedia notes, she pledged her allegiance to Muqtada as Sadr:

Klein's August 2004 "Bring Najaf to New York", published in The Nation, argued that Muqtada Al Sadr's Mahdi Army "represents the overwhelmingly mainstream sentiment in Iraq."^[34] She went on to say "Yes, if elected Sadr would try to turn Iraq into a theocracy like Iran, but for now his demands are for direct elections and an end to foreign occupation"

Obviously, Klein is more than just another committed leftist. Her support for a man who would turn Iraq into a theocracy, given the consequences for women and gays, makes her a crackpot and a flake.

She is an ideological fanatic whose hatred of America and free market capitalism is so great that she prefers to consign people to an Iranian theocracy rather than to a liberal democracy. Since hatred knows no limits she has no concern for human life or human beings and should be disqualified from appearing at international forums on political economy.

By making Klein, a notorious atheist, a co-chair of a conference the Pope discredits himself.

Naturally, Klein is also a committed anti-Semite. Comparing Israeli policy toward Palestinian terrorists to South African apartheid she supports the Boycott Divest Sanction movement against what she calls Israeli “criminality.”

In 2009 she wrote:

The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa. In July 2005 a huge coalition of Palestinian groups laid out plans to do just that. They called on "people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era". The campaign Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions was born.

Every day that Israel pounds Gaza brings more converts to the BDS cause - even among Israeli Jews. In the midst of the assault roughly 500 Israelis, dozens of them well-known artists and scholars, sent a letter to foreign ambassadors in Israel. It calls for "the adoption of immediate restrictive measures and sanctions" and draws a clear parallel with the anti-apartheid struggle. "The boycott on South Africa was effective, but Israel is handled with kid gloves ... This international backing must stop."

One does not, in her article read a single word condemning Palestinian terrorism. About the fact that Hamas has pledged not only to destroy Israel but to kill Jews everywhere, she is silent.

Naomi Klein is a left-wing extremist and fanatic. She has no place in a Vatican conference on climate change or on anything at all. One would have thought that Communism was dead and buried. And yet, some political and religious leaders are still irresistibly drawn to it.

No respectable political leader ought to enhance the reputation of Naomi Klein. Not if he wants to remain respectable.