Posted on 10/18/2006 12:49:53 PM PDT by Free ThinkerNY
RIVERSIDE'S TERROR RALLY
By CHARLES E.F. MILLARD
October 18, 2006 -- In the uproar over Monday's outrageously soft sentence for terror-aiding lawyer Lynne Stewart, Riverside Church seems to be distancing itself from the despicable rally it hosted in her support Sunday.
Stewart was convicted by a jury of her peers. The uncontested facts were that she had smuggled messages from convicted terrorist Omar Abdel Rahman ("the blind sheik") to his followers in the Islamic world. Those messages directed his followers in the terror group Gama'a Islamiyya to end their cease-fire with the Egyptian government and begin killing Rahman's enemies.
Rahman, allegedly a mastermind in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, was convicted of conspiracy to blow up the Lincoln and Holland tunnels as well as the United Nations.
Why, in the name of God, would any church host a rally in support of a woman who admitted she had spread a message of hate and death?
Well, in her testimony at trial, Stewart said: "To rid ourselves of the entrenched, voracious type of capitalism that is in this country that perpetuates sexism and racism, I don't think that can come nonviolently." This seems to be what Riverside Church wishes to support.
The church's Web site announced its rally in the following way: "In a case that has echoes of . . . Sacco/Vanzetti and the Rosenbergs, attorney Lynne Stewart will be sentenced on Oct. 16."
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Good question.
David Horowitz quotes freeper Piasa in his book The Shadow Party.
Horowitz and co-writer Richard Poe (a freeper) searched the internet for information about Soros paying for Lynne Stewart's defense and couldn't find information anywhere.
Then they stumbled on Piasa's post on Free Republic; this is what they wrote in the book:
We typed "Lynne Stewart" and "Lynne Stewart Defense Committee" into the website's (Soro's web site) general and advanced search engines. Our searches produced no links to any Lynne Stewart listing in the Institute's grant database.
Only after much rambling around the internet did we finally locate a page on the FreeRepublic.com message board where an anonymous researcher using the screen name "piasa" just happened to have posted a direct web address to soros.org's grant listing for the Lynne Stewart Defense Committee. We found the link, but it took luck and persistence . Without "piasa", we might have failed. This experience ssuggests to us that, prior to Byron York's expose, potential donors wishing to avoid contribution to charities that fund terrorists might have found it difficult to learn about the Institute's involvement with Lynne Stewart.
Soros donated $20,000 - heard it on the O'Reilly Factor.
Goodness...this is an easy one.It's because most of the "communicants" of this "church" are,in fact,atheist leftists who,for some reason,aren't inclined to sleep in on Sunday mornings.
Maybe, just maybe, more people are totally fed-up with our celebration of treason in this country. I hope this is a swelling disenchantment enough to overcome the liberal tide of the MSM and lead to traitorous acts in higher places than the courts and its officers. Maybe members of congress might be more closely examined?
More like $20,000/day. It's the tip of the iceberg.
It's a good example of what Ann Coulter called the Church of Godless Liberalism. For Riverside (a basion of leftism) to call itself a church is akin to calling the Bible the Communist Manifesto.
Rahmann is not ALLEGEDLY the mastermind of the WTC bombing, he was CONVICTED of that attack in 93.
you need a shave there, tootsie
Seems we are blessed to have many Buckhead's and Piasa's on our amazing awesome wonderful bestest of all time, website.
Ditto that.
Riverside Church has gone far to the left recently, like many mainstream Protestant churches. This doesn't surprise me at all.
The woman is not innocent. But the leftist crowd doesn't care about that.
Does anybody actually go there to pray or do they just go there for the pro terrorist rallies?
Good work, piasa! :-)
I had forgotten about those pardons. They should be brought up whenever the Democrats get huffy about accusations that Clinton was soft on terrorism.
Hope some other prisoner gives her a proper greeting.
Is Riverside one of those new mega-churches usually referred to as "worship centers" and mostly specializing in humanist solutions and a disdain for the cross of Christ and the gospel. Don't know; just asking. I'll click into their website and see for myself. . .
"Is Riverside one of those new mega-churches usually referred to as
"worship centers" and mostly specializing in humanist solutions and
a disdain for the cross of Christ and the gospel. "
Uuhh, yep.
Good, concise background in the article linked below.
Also, I did read the NYTimes article mentioned about the $10 million
supposedly missing from the church treasury (sorry I don't have a copy)
http://news.ucc.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=666&Itemid=1
(excerpt)
...Still others have said the Forbes era has been marked by financial mismanagement and even took the church leadership to court, alleging $10 million in church funds had been lost, according to The New York Times.
Rmlew, did these folks ever try to proselytize at Columbia?
did it? I thought rockefeller was behind it and integrated it at a time when that was unthinkable.
Still a beautiful building.
Thanks, but as our 'good friends' over at Media Matters say, it was "nothing."
http://mediamatters.org/items/200608020003
Of course, as you can see by this link they do seem to have their panties in a bunch over Horowitz's and Poe's article though they spend their time fretting about the methods rather than the information.
The Lyndon LaRouche insult was cute- if you ever want to know what these progressive Dems are up to, look at what they allege about you.
I am sure that St. Hillary Clinton worships at the altar of Lynne Stewart. Those two deserve each other.
Typical smoke and mirrors. They can't dispute that OSI funded Stewart's defense fund, so they divert attention from that fact with an ad hominem attack on Horowitz and Poe for crediting the source of a lead, which in Media Matters' eyes is evidently a much more serious offense than funding a terrorist coconspirator.
Prominent Protestant. Harry Emerson Fosdick was one of the major voices of liberal Protestantism in the middle of the twentieth century. As pastor of the spectacular, nondenominational Riverside Church in New York City and as the leading Protestant speaker on radio, he helped to define the personality and meaning of mainline Protestantism for thirty years. Through his collected sermons, his public stands on issues, and his radio services, Harry Emerson Fosdick became not only the best-known preacher of his day but also a representative of the modernist forces that struggled with Fundamentalists during the 1920s.
Early Recognition. Fosdick was born in upstate New York and entered the Baptist ministry after graduating from Union Theological Seminary in New York. His talents and abilities were quickly recognized. He became professor of practical theology at Union in 1911 and taught there until he retired in 1946. In 1919 the dwindling congregations of the First Presbyterian Church in New York City, the University Place Presbyterian Church, and the Madison Square Presbyterian Church agreed to merge to concentrate their combined resources and efforts. Fosdick, a graduate of Colgate College and Union Theological Seminary in New York and already widely known for his sermons, was asked to become the congregation's preaching minster. The fact that he was and would remain a Baptist in this Presbyterian church was considered irrelevant.
Success and Publicity. Fosdick's services attracted large crowds, and the experiment seemed a splendid success. In 1922 Fosdick entered the growing war between the increasingly militant Fundamentalists and the modernists. In his sermon "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" he condemned the exclusionary practices of the Fundamentalists and pleaded for a church where individual beliefs on issues such as the virgin birth of Jesus, the inerrancy of the Scriptures, and the question of the Second Coming of Christ were left to individual interpretation while all Christians worked together for the common good. The sermon attracted extensive publicity, particularly after public-relations man Ivy Lee republished it as "New Knowledge and Christian Faith" and distributed it to the nation's Protestant clergy.
Contention. The line between Fundamentalists and modernists was now drawn in the northern Presbyterian Church. Fundamentalists and their conservatives allies, particularly the faculty of the denomination's Princeton Theological Seminary at Princeton University, responded with outrage. Not only was Fosdick unsound in doctrine, he was an interloper in one of the denomination's leading congregations. For the next two years the issue of Fosdick and his place in the denomination was fought at meetings of the various governing bodies of the Presbyterian Church, including the annual meetings of the General Assembly, the church's governing body. Here Fosdick's rejection of the Five Points of Fundamentalist belief was condemned by a large minority of the delegates, but church governance would not allow the annual body to remove him from his congregation.
Resignation. The New York Presbytery tried to protect Fosdick, as did First Presbyterian Church, which adamantly refused his offer to resign. In 1925 a seeming compromise was reached: the New York Presbytery proposed that Fosdick join the denomination and regularize his relationship with the church and his congregation. On the surface this would resolve the issue of Fosdick's denominational loyalties; but as a Presbyterian, he would also be subject to denominational control, and some sort of heresy trial was likely if he accepted that route. Fosdick concluded that the Fundamentalists would eventually expel him, and he resigned from First Presbyterian in March 1925.
Moving On. Fosdick was more than a symbol--he was a brilliant preacher. As the controversy whirled, a new pulpit was found for him. He was offered the ministry of the Park Avenue Baptist Church, also in New York City, a congregation that included some of the nation's leading businessmen, including John D. Rockefeller Jr. The congregation had completed an expensive new sanctuary in 1922. In negotiations with the directors of the church, Fosdick insisted that the church modify its requirement that only those who had been baptized by immersion be accepted for membership, a tenet that had long been a key principle of Baptists. Park Avenue Baptist agreed to open admission, and the offer was sweetened when Rockefeller offered to provide much of the funding for a sanctuary in Morningside Heights, outside the silk-stocking district of the city, to create a church inclusive in class as well as in doctrine.
Becoming Established. Fosdick later recalled that in his talks with Rockefeller in regard to the move, he speculated about the effects of his relationship with one of the world's richest men. Rockefeller responded, "Do you think more people will criticize you on account of my wealth, than will criticize me on account of your theology?" The agreement to create an interdenominational Protestant church was made. The building on Park Avenue was sold, and the money from the sale, combined with a generous gift from Rockefeller, led to the construction of the great Riverside Church in Morningside Heights in New York. The new sanctuary was officially opened in 1930 and remained Fosdick's home and the location of the studio for his popular radio services until his retirement.While his congregation supported Fosdick, he decided to accept an offer to pastor the Park Avenue Baptist Church. That congregation then decided to move to a new sanctuary to be built on Riverside Heights near Union and Columbia University. The Riverside Church, which was generously supported by John D. Rockefeller Jr., was dedicated in 1930.
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