Kermit Gosnell and America’s Holocaust

Abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell was recently found guilty of a laundry list of crimes including three counts of first degree murder for the killings of several babies that were born alive at his abortion clinic. Gosnell was accused of cutting the necks of the babies in violation of Pennsylvania law and basic human decency.

Gosnell has received virtually no support or sympathy from the pro-choice crowd. The head of NARAL Pro-Choice America said that Gosnell will “get what he deserves” in a statement. Before his arrest, her view of Gosnell would likely have been different. Many abortion clinics in surrounding states referred late term patients to Gosnell for abortions because it was common knowledge in the abortion industry that he was an abortionist who had little regard for state laws limiting abortion to 24 weeks according to the grand jury report.

It is also interesting to note that the same pro-choice activists who now throw Gosnell under the bus still fight for the right to perform abortions. If the babies that Gosnell murdered had still been in the womb, pro-choice activists would have rallied around him as a martyr. In the past, pro-choice groups have opposed any meaningful restrictions on abortion, even fighting against a ban on brutal partial birth abortions in which a baby is delivered except for the head. The abortionist then punctures the baby’s skull, still inside the woman’s body, and inserts a catheter to suck out the brain. Partial birth abortions were performed on babies much older than the 24 weeks mandated by Pennsylvania. Pro-choice groups have also opposed parental notification laws, clinic inspections (Gosnell’s clinic was appallingly unsanitary), and limits on when abortions can be performed.

Godwin’s Law dictates that the longer an internet discussion goes on, the more likely it is that someone will make an analogy about Nazis. Consequently, comparisons to Nazis or the use of “Nazi” or “fascist” as an epithet are so overdone that they have lost much of their effectiveness. Nevertheless, from time to time, a situation arises where a valid comparison to Nazis can be made. The case of Kermit Gosnell is one of these situations.

Gosnell’s Women’s Medical Society was every bit as much a murder factory as the German concentration camps. The babies, the majority of the victims of Gosnell’s crimes, were dehumanized in the eyes of their murderers, just as the Jews and other victims of the camps were dehumanized in the eyes of their Nazi captors.

This dehumanization began with what is standard practice for pro-choice activists: the refusal to call an unborn baby a “baby.” When a baby becomes a “fetus” it is easier to think of it in less than human terms, an “inanimate lump of cells” in the words and minds of some pro-abortion advocates. This is directly analogous to the way in which Nazis dehumanized Jews, Slavs and others as “untermenschen,” sub-humans.

When someone is viewed as sub-human, they are easier to kill. At some point during the nearly 40 years of his practice, Gosnell and his staff members graduated from killing unborn “fetuses” to killing living, breathing babies who had “precipitated,” the office euphemism for birth.

Like the Nazi executioners, the staff of the Women’s Medical Society became so desensitized that they even joked about the babies they were killing or played with them before they cut their spinal cords according to grand jury testimony. Gosnell was said to commonly joke after killing big, late term babies that they could have “walked me to the bus stop.”

Testimony of the Holocaust includes tales of kindness from Germans at one moment followed by cold-blooded, businesslike killing the next. The book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” details the account of German soldiers who found a group of hidden Jewish orphans. Feeling pity for the untermenschen children, they put them at the head of the line for extermination so that they would not suffer.

Undercover videos by the pro-life documentary group Live Action reveal that the practice of dehumanizing unborn babies is common. In most cases, the abortionists never utter the words “baby,” “kill,” or “die.” Instead, a “pregnancy” is “terminated” or “fetal demise” is ensured. In violation of state and federal law, as well as human decency, the undercover activists are repeatedly assured that if the baby survives the abortion, the clinic workers will not help it live.

For other abortion clinics, the dehumanization also extends beyond killing the baby in the womb. One abortionist in the Bronx, where a baby is as likely to be aborted as born, tells the undercover filmmaker to “flush it” if she delivers her baby away from the clinic. LeRoy Carhart, known for performing late term abortions, is unusually direct and blunt, telling patients that they will have a dead baby inside them for three days that will be softening up like “meat in a crock pot.” More typical is the Bronx abortionist who says, “We don’t use the word ‘kill.’” Likewise, the Nazis also used a number of euphemisms for their killing, including several that are the same or very similar to terms used by abortionists.

Like the Nazi camps, abortion clinics, Gosnell’s in particular, are assembly lines of death. The grand jury report notes that Gosnell’s clinic was subject to a constant stream of patients, some coming for abortions, others for illegal drugs. Gosnell’s untrained and uncertified staff would promptly sedate the women coming for abortions because Gosnell didn’t like it when women screamed or moaned in pain. The women were also given drugs to induce labor, often in Gosnell’s absence. Because Gosnell often came in late, babies were often born alive; one or two each night according to the testimony, often entering the world into the toilet in Gosnell’s clinic. Gosnell allegedly preferred it when babies were born alive because it made his job easier. An abortion procedure could take up to half an hour. It was much quicker to kill a living baby and just suck out the placenta.

Also like the Nazis, Gosnell and other abortionists profit handsomely from their killings. According to the grand jury report, Gosnell’s take from his clinic was estimated at $1.8 million per year, most of it in cash. Police found $240,000 and a gun hidden in his 12-year-old daughter’s closet when they raided his house.

Abortion is profitable for other clinics as well. The American Center for Law and Justice points out that 51 percent of Planned Parenthood’s income comes from abortions. Planned Parenthood, a for-profit business that also receives taxpayer funds, receives more than $164 million per year from abortions. The sale of body parts from aborted babies for medical and pharmaceutical research is rumored to be a multimillion dollar underground industry (Nazis experimented on their victims as well). In spite of the lucrative nature of the abortion business, as noted earlier on Examiner, abortion clinics are often unsanitary and ill equipped. Infections, complications and even deaths of women resulting from the substandard conditions in abortion clinics are not uncommon.

Nazi death camps and abortion clinics also share common roots in the racist scientific theories of the early 20^th century. Hitler’s ideas were rooted in eugenics, a pseudoscience popularized in California, which held that humanity could be improved by controlling the genetic makeup of society. According to PBS, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was also a proponent of eugenics.

Hitler took eugenics one step further by totally eliminating - killing - those he deemed unfit. From the 1920s until after World War II, the mentally handicapped were sometimes the subject of forced sterilizations due to American eugenics laws. In 1918, a U.S. Army doctor, Paul Popenoe, had suggested executing “defective” people to “keep up the standard of the race” according to George Mason University. Hitler seized these ideas, which had been funded by Americans like Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller, and began sterilizing German undesirables almost as soon as the Nazis came to power. In 1940, two years before the Final Solution for the Jews was formalized, the Germans began euthanizing – killing – the mentally retarded, the physically handicapped, and the mentally ill. Even today, the possibility of birth defects remains a main rationalization for abortion, a legacy of eugenics.

The Holocaust stands as one of the great tragedies of human history. Not only Jews, but other untermenschen and undesirables such as Slavs, gypsies, political prisoners and others were killed by the Nazis. The BBC estimates that the total number of civilians murdered by the Nazis was about 15 million over the 12 years of the “thousand year Reich’s” existence. Politifact estimates that there have been 50 million abortions in the U.S. since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973.

Perhaps the most positive thing that can be said about the Gosnell trial is that most Americans are shocked by the revelations about the U.S. abortion industry. When people are shocked by Gosnell’s behavior, they are not yet desensitized to the slaughter of innocents among us. When abortionists must cover their deeds with euphemisms, lies and a media blackout there is hope that the American public will become aware and angry enough to act.

Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List, said it best in a statement on the group’s website: “The few inches that separate a child in the womb from a child outside the womb should never determine whether its intentional ‘demise’ is permitted by law or whether a ‘right’ to kill it no longer exists.”

Originally published on Examiner:

 

http://www.examiner.com/list/kermit-gosnell-and-america-s-auschwitz

Trayvon Martin case is gray, not black and white

By now the entire nation is watching the unfolding drama of the Trayvon Martin killing in Sanford, Fl. The basic facts of the case are undisputed. Seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin, who is black, was shot and killed by George Zimmerman, a white neighborhood watch captain, on the night of February 26. Beyond those basic facts, however, the case becomes far more muddled.

Much of the country is up in arms over the allegation that Zimmerman shot and killed Martin simply because the black teenager was walking through his neighborhood. Zimmerman has not been charged in the case because he claims that the shooting was in self-defense.

In the months before the shooting, there had been several burglaries in the neighborhood where Zimmerman lived. A neighbor, Frank Taaffe, told NBC Miami that there had been eight break-ins within 15 months, mostly committed by young black males. The crime rate set the stage for the shooting.

On the night in question, relatives say that Martin, wearing a hoodie, was walking back to the home of his father’s fiancée from a local 7-Eleven after purchasing a can of iced tea and Skittles. The fiancée lives in Zimmerman’s gated community, which is racially mixed.

Martin’s girlfriend was on the phone with him just before the altercation according to CNN. The girl says that Martin told her that someone was following him and that he was trying to get away. She says that she heard someone ask Martin what he was doing and heard Martin ask why he was being followed. At that point, the phone went dead. She did not hear a gunshot.

At the same time that Martin was talking to his girlfriend, George Zimmerman, who had seen Martin while going to the grocery store, was talking to a 911 dispatcher. A transcript of Zimmerman’s 911 call is available on Documentcloud.org. In the call, Zimmerman states his belief that Martin was “on drugs” and that he “looks like he’s up to no good.” He says, “These a—holes, they always get away.” Seconds later, he says that Martin is running away.

In a controversial part of the call, the dispatcher asks, “Are you following him?” When Zimmerman answers in the affirmative, the dispatcher says, “We don’t need you to do that.” Zimmerman answers, “Okay.” The call ends with the dispatcher agreeing to send police to meet Zimmerman.

What happened next is a matter of dispute. According to the Orlando Sentinel, Zimmerman, who wore a red jacket that night, told police that he had stopped following Martin and was returning to his car when Martin approached him from behind. He claims that Martin asked him if he had a problem. When Zimmerman said no, Martin allegedly said, “You do now” and punched him in the nose, knocking him to the ground. At that point, Zimmerman says that Martin pinned him and began beating him while he was still on the ground. Zimmerman reports that he yelled for help. The Sentinel reports that when police arrived a few minutes later, summoned by Zimmerman’s original call, that they found that Zimmerman had a bloody nose, a swollen lip, and injuries to the back of his head.

Zimmerman’s cries for help prompted several other residents to call the police according to CNN. Two women, Mary Cutcher and Selma Lamilla, report that they heard “whining, someone in distress, and then the gunshot” through an open window. When the women ran outside they saw Zimmerman standing over Martin. They asked Zimmerman three times what was going on before he responded by telling them to call the police.

Fox Orlando reports that another witness, identified only as John, said that Martin had been on top of Zimmerman. He said that “the guy on the bottom who had a red sweater (Zimmerman) on was yelling to me: 'help, help….’” He went upstairs to call 911 and then looked out again and saw that “the guy who was on top (Martin) beating up the other guy was the one laying in the grass, and I believe he was dead at that point.”

Further complicating the story are revelations that Trayvon Martin had a somewhat troubled past. NBC Miami reported that Martin had been suspended from school on three separate occasions. In one incident, Martin had been sighted “"hiding and being suspicious" in an unauthorized area of his school.

Last October, a school investigator saw surveillance video of Martin writing “WTF” (“what the f—k”) on a door inside the school. The next day, police searched Martin’s backpack for the graffiti marker and also found a screwdriver described as a “burglary tool” and 12 pieces of jewelry that included silver wedding bands and diamond earrings. According to the NBC report, Martin denied that the jewelry was his and said that it belonged to a friend who he declined to name. It is not known whether the jewelry was stolen. Four months after this, just a few days before the shooting, he was suspended again for possession of a marijuana pipe and an empty baggie with traces of marijuana in it.

The Daily Caller also recently published a record of Trayvon Martin’s tweets from his Twitter account, @NO_LIMIT_NIGGA, a reference to a gangsta rap song. Absent from the remaining record after the account was deleted are tweets that a blogger at Wagist claims imply that Martin “swung on a bus driver.” Wagist also presents a Facebook message where a friend contacted Martin with “business to talk” because he needed a “plant.” Even if Martin were a drug dealer or gang member, it would not mean that Zimmerman was right to kill him. It would, however, introduce significant doubt into the mainstream media’s version of events.

For his part, Zimmerman has a record as well.  Reuters reports that he was arrested in 2005 and charged with resisting arrest and battery on a police officer.  His fiancée also filed a restraining order against him citing domestic violence around the same time.  This is apparently where his now famous mug shot came from.

The State of Florida’s so-called “stand-your-ground” law has also come in for much criticism. In reality, the law merely means that a person has no duty to retreat from an attack before defending himself. Propublica.com reports that 23 other states have similar laws. The concept of stand-your-ground, also called the Castle Doctrine because it is normally applied within the home, is longstanding in U.S. law. The Supreme Court upheld the concept as far back as 1895 in Beard v. United States.

In any case, stand-your-ground would not apply in the Trayvon Martin shooting. If Zimmerman had continued following Martin after the 911 call ended and shot him in cold blood, as the media and Martin’s family and supporters allege, then it would not be a defense because the law does not give citizens the right to chase down and shoot suspects. Likewise, Florida law specifically excludes the justification of self-defense by someone who “initially provokes the use of force against himself.” If Zimmerman picked a fight with Martin and then shot him, he cannot claim self-defense. On the other hand, if Martin attacked Zimmerman and held him down, not only was Zimmerman not required by the law to retreat, he did not have that option.

The story has inspired protests in Atlanta and around the country on behalf of Martin to demand Zimmerman’s arrest. A black activist group has even offered a reward for Zimmerman’s capture. Spike Lee tweeted what he incorrectly though was Zimmerman’s address, possibly endangering the lives of an elderly couple. Rather than calling for cooler heads, President Obama sympathized with Martin’s parents.

Although more information is being released every day in the case, it is evident that the Trayvon Martin killing is not the simple case of violent racism that the prevailing media narrative tells. The pattern has been repeated several times in recent years. Pundits claimed that Troy Davis, a convicted cop-killer executed in Georgia last year, was an innocent man while ignoring facts that didn’t fit their story. Before that, the left-wing media was ready to convict the entire Tea Party in the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Before that, the target was the entire Duke University lacrosse team for rape, sexual assault, and kidnapping before it came to light that Mike Nifong, the prosecuting D.A., withheld DNA evidence and misled a judge. In that case the North Carolina attorney general said that there was no credible evidence that an attack had even occurred.

The current rush to judge George Zimmerman is not helpful to anyone. In the end, the case of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman may very well turn out to be very different from how it has been presented in the media thus far. If the evidence indicates that Zimmerman is lying, then he will be arrested and charged. If not, then his electronic lynching in the media will have ruined his reputation and endangered his life.

Originally published on Examiner.com:
http://www.examiner.com/conservative-in-atlanta/the-truth-about-trayvon-martin-is-gray-not-black-and-white

Woman who mailed pig foot shot by police in apparent jihad attempt

A Marietta grandmother who mailed a package containing a bloody pig foot to N.Y. Rep. Peter King and a Curious George doll to N.Y. State Senator Greg Ball earlier this year was killed by police on Christmas Day at her home. Her death came a few weeks after her indictment and plea of not guilty in federal court for mailing threatening communications. The federal judge had ordered her to undergo a psychiatric evaluation according to WSB TV. She was reportedly out on bond.

According to reports of the incident, Jameela Barnette, 53, a self-described “Messenger of Allah,” was killed by Cobb County police officers responding to a panic alert triggered from her apartment. Barnette allegedly attacked the officers with a gun and a knife when they responded to the alarm. The officers shot her in the course of defending themselves.

Examiner readers may remember that the Atlanta Conservative Examiner published a series of articles on the mail incident beginning on April 18, 2011. The original article appeared on my personal blog, CaptainKudzu.com, simultaneously with its publication on Examiner.com. Barnette, herself a blogger who waged an internet campaign against people and websites that she perceived as anti-Muslim, read the article on Captain Kudzu and left several comments. I subsequently published some of these comments in a second Examiner article on April 19. Barnette also posted several comments on a Captain Kudzu Easter article, “In defense of miracles,” during the same time period.

I was able to obtain her email address through the comments she left and attempted to contact Barnette to learn why she sent the packages. Although she initially had no interest in telling her side of the story, she later consented to an email interview and provided me with the now-famous picture with Dustin Hoffman. The email exchanges culminated in an article simultaneously published on Examiner and CaptainKudzu.com on April 26.

After that article was published, she thanked me for my objectivity and “unbiased honesty” in another email. Other than occasionally receiving more of her messages “from Allah,” which were soon relegated to my spam folder, I had no other contact with her after that. Until her death made the news this week, I was not even aware that she had been indicted for her mailings. She had been confident that she would escape prosecution because she didn’t make any overt threats.

In our correspondence Jameela was always polite and respectful. It was only when she got up on her Islamist soapbox, that she spouted hatred. Her messages are some of the most vile, racist and profane missives that I have ever read. Although a former Jew, she unapologetically likened Jews to apes and pigs (Surah 5:60) and was no friendlier to Christians who worship “a bloodied, battered and partially-eaten and bled-out, rotting DEAD [emphasis hers] Jew.” She was not shy about her desire to turn the United States into a Muslim nation in which “white b-----s” [expletive deleted] name their children Mohammed and wear veils in accordance with Islamic law.

A major reason that I gave Jameela the chance to speak out in my column was that I felt that she provided a valuable insight into the minds of radical Muslims. Jameela might have been a loner in Marietta, but there are thousands of other Muslims in this country and millions around the world who share her beliefs. It was people who shared Jameela’s beliefs that carried out the 9/11 attacks. It is people who share Jameela’s beliefs that have been at war with the United States for decades, much longer than the United States has been in Iraq or Afghanistan.

While not all Muslims share Jameela’s fanatical and racist ideology, even a small percentage of them can add up to thousands of extremists in this country and millions around the world. A withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan will not change the attitudes of these radicals. For them, it was never about Iraq or Afghanistan. It is about spreading their brand of orthodox Islam around the globe and ridding the world of the Jews.

Even though I had not thought of Jameela in months, I cannot say that I was surprised to hear of her death. My initial thought was that the incident sounded like what is often called “suicide by cop,” in which someone who wants to die threatens police in order to get them to kill him. After more consideration, however, I no longer believe that to be the case.

My opinion is that Jameela launched her own terrorist attack against representatives of the United States. Lacking the knowledge and materials to build a suicide bomb vest, she summoned police with the intention of killing as many as possible and then becoming a martyr. In her twisted theology, she likely believed that the police were infidels who doing the bidding of their Jewish masters in tormenting her. In the end, she was no different from the terrorists in Iraq and Palestine who believe that sacrificing themselves to kill innocents is a worthy and noble cause that will secure their place in heaven.

To most of us, Jameela’s words and actions seem crazy. If she was crazy though, what does that make the multitudes of other radical Muslims around the world who share her beliefs and are also willing to martyr themselves?

I wish to extend my condolences to Ms. Barnette’s family, especially her grandchildren, who will now have to grow up with the shame of her actions on top of the loss that they will undoubtedly feel after her death. I also pray that God will have mercy on her poor misguided soul.

Read this article on Examiner.com:

http://www.examiner.com/conservative-in-atlanta/woman-who-mailed-pig-foot-talked-to-examiner-before-police-shooting

Casey Anthony and the pro-choice culture of death

Casey Anthony (Wikimedia)

There has been a huge public outcry over the acquittal of the Florida mother accused of killing her two-year-old daughter.  Casey Anthony was acquitted of the murder charges against her, but convicted on four counts of lying to police.  She will be set free after the next week after being credited for the time that she has already served.

Like O.J. Simpson, Anthony was acquitted in the court of law, but found guilty in the court of public opinion.  Her responsibility for the death of her daughter was taken for granted by the media and the millions of viewers who watched the trial on live television.  The titillating details of how she partied at Orlando nightclubs while little Caylee was missing stoked national anger against Casey.  A late June poll of west Floridians by WFTV showed that 92 percent believed that Casey killed Caylee.

Casey Anthony’s alleged crime might be described as a post-natal abortion.  If, as she is accused of doing, Anthony actually killed her daughter because being a mother interfered with her carefree lifestyle then her action is different from abortion primarily in that her daughter was two-years-old instead of an unborn baby. 

Peter Singer (Bbsrock/Wikimedia)

While the law does differentiate between unborn and born humans, there are actually people who advocate that actions similar to those for which Anthony was accused should be legal.  For example, Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton University, does not dispute that unborn babies are living humans.  To Singer, however, that still does not mean that killing unborn babies is wrong.  In fact, Singer believes that abortion should be taken a step further.  In Singer’s view, even a newborn baby “has no sense of the future, and therefore is not a person.”  He says in an interview on the Princeton website that “killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living.” 

There are other academics who have argued in favor of infanticide.  Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at MIT, wrote an article for the New York Times in 1997 in which he argued that the right to life is contingent upon “having a unique sequence of experiences that defines us as individuals and connects us to other people, …an ability to reflect upon ourselves as a continuous locus of consciousness, to form and savor plans for the future, to dread death and to express the choice not to die. And there's the rub: our immature neonates don't possess these traits any more than mice do.”

In the same article Pinker cites other academics in favor of infanticide.  Michael Tooley, a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder, says that it should be legal to kill newborns for a specific length of time after birth.  Psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson have argued that if a newborn is seriously ill that parents must “decide” whether to “cut their losses and favor the healthiest in the litter or try again later on.”

James Watson, a discoverer of DNA and the first director of the Human Genome Project, had a similar view.  In 1973, Time magazine quoted Watson in an interview with an AMA magazine as saying “if a child were not declared alive until three days after birth, then all parents could be allowed the choice that only a few are given under the present system.  The doctor could allow the child to die if the parents so chose and save a lot of misery and suffering."

In the Netherlands, these ideas are already being put into practice.  In 2002, the Groningen protocol set forth standards for performing euthanasia on newborns with incurable deformities, but “the New Republic” noted that it could be applied to children as old as twelve.  Above the age of twelve, Dutch law already allows euthanasia with parental consent.  Dutch law prohibits involuntary euthanasia, but there are allegations that doctors are increasingly killing patients, both babies and adults, without consent or permission.  

While much of the support for infanticide is based on euthanizing the terminally ill, Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, was explicit in her support of infanticide for convenience.  Anne Barbeau Gardiner notes that Sanger wrote in “Woman and the New Race” that “the most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.”  In “My Fight for Birth Control” she sympathized with a drunken man who considered his newborn a “nuisance” and threw the “naked infant into the snow” because of he was “desperate for want of sleep and quiet.”  She also approved of “drowning girl children” during famines in China in her book “Pivot of Civilization.”

Margaret Sanger (Wikimedia)

It is a short leap from abortion to infanticide.  Even though abortion is typically defended on grounds of medical necessity it is commonly accepted that over ninety percent of abortions are performed for convenience or personal preference rather than medical reasons.  When leading philosophers, ethicists, and doctors dispute the immorality of killing newborns it is easy to see how infanticide for medical reasons could quickly degenerate to infanticide for convenience.   

This brings us back to Casey Anthony and the other mothers who have been accused of killing their children.  These women have been given an inconsistent message about both the humanity of their children and the immorality of killing them.  The legalization of abortion for convenience and the advocacy of euthanasia and assisted suicide have helped to cheapen human life to the extent that some  consider a newborn baby a nuisance to be discarded on the whim of the parent. 

It is an irrational act of cognitive dissonance to hold forth that babies, born or unborn, are not people and that killing them is not immoral and then be surprised when parents do just that.  If our society is determined to continue to walk the tightrope between life and convenience, it will continue to be complicit in the murders of children like Caylee Anthony.

 

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