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At the U.N., a Firebrand Increasingly in the Mainstream; His Tirades Against U.S.-Led Economic Order Are Resonating

I've noticed that "firebrand" holy men are usually noted for causing a lot more damage than they clear up. Being a "firebrand" puts Father Brockman in the same category as Qazi, Tater, and Abu Qatada.

The Marist order is pretty much noted for producing such "firebrands," and they're deeply involved in the liberation theology flavor of Marxism. His statement that "justice, mercy and compassion" blithely ignores the fact that the United States was for most of the 20th century the most generous country in the world, both in the fires, floods, and other natural disasters and in the aid provided to defeated enemies who by long tradition should have been paying us reparations.

There is usually a difference between ostentatious compassion and the real thing. I suppose you can actually be compassionate and be ostentatious about it, but as a rule those most ostentatious in their compassion write small checks.

Case in point: Allah sends a tsunami to devastate Indonesia, a Muslim nation. Saudi Arabia, two steps from Islamic theocracy, ostentatiously collects zakat, which is defined as alms, presumably for the poor. They don't show up when earthquakes or tsunamis devastate Guatamala or Czechoslovakia or Los Angeles, so we assume the zakat is reserved for Muslims. Yet us infidels outspent all of Arabia when Indonesia got smote, even while the UN was a.) complaining we weren't doing enough and b.) trying to present themselves as Johnny-on-the-spot.

The Rev. Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, a revolutionary Nicaraguan priest, sounded like the old-school, 1980s-style Latin American leftist he is when he began his presidency of the 192-member U.N. General Assembly in September.

But as the world's financial turmoil deepens and the pillars of modern capitalism appear increasingly shaky, his tirades against what he considers the evils of an American-led economic order are gaining a more sympathetic audience here with each passing day.

A crushing global economic crisis has provided the Maryknoll priest with a pulpit to preach his sermon of class warfare between the world's rich and poor to an increasingly receptive audience, with more moderate figures such as Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and French leader Nicolas Sarkozy echoing his criticism of the U.S. free-market system. "Some of this stuff he was saying in September sounded wacky, but now it's sort of in the mainstream" said Colin Keating, a former New Zealand diplomat who runs the Security Council Report, a policy group focusing on the United Nations. "It does partly account for slightly changed levels of respect."

A Sandinista foreign minister from 1979 to 1990 who once referred to President Ronald Reagan as the "butcher of my people," d'Escoto has emerged as an unlikely standard-bearer of the U.N. membership that had in many ways been moving beyond the Cold War battles that long defined him.

Equipped with a hearing aid and suffering from vertigo, the 75-year-old sermonizes about the cruelty of a political order that has done too little to improve the lives of the poorest. His self-effacing and sometimes humorous style has more in common with a small-town pastor than that of the stern Marxist ideologue -- Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega -- who championed his candidacy to the U.N. post.

D'Escoto decries the contamination of the world's economic order by a "spirit of selfishness and individualism" that views "justice, mercy and compassion" as incompatible with economic activity, as he said at a recent U.N. interfaith conference. "The world has become a moral basket case," he said at a news conference last week.
Posted by: Fred 2008-12-01

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