Brazilian
Left-Wing Sorcerer with History of Fight against Conservative Christians Is Awarded
by the Trump Administration
By Julio Severo
Shock. It is the only word that can be
used to describe the behavior of the U.S. State Department, commanded by a conservative
evangelical, awarding a Brazilian radical left-wing sorcerer who has fought
conservative evangelicals in Brazil.
 |
| Ivanir dos Santos and Mike Pompeo |
The administration of President Donald
Trump held the largest religious freedom event in the world in 2019: the Ministerial
to Advance Religious Freedom. With more than 1,000 civil society and religious
leaders, and more than 100 foreign delegations invited, the gathering marked
the first time a Secretary of State has convened back-to-back religious leaders
on the same human rights issue. The event was held from July 16 to 18, 2019 in
Washington DC. The inaugural Ministerial in 2018 was the first-ever to focus
solely on the inalienable human right of religious freedom.
In his remarks to open the event, U.S.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo noted the broad range of participants:
Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Falun Gong, etc.
In the event, Pompeo said,
“I want to thank everyone here who has
committed a part of their life to helping those who are persecuted and to
defending the inalienable right to practice one’s religion and follow their
conscience and to take care of their soul.”
The U.S. Embassy in Brazil told about the
event,
“The Trump Administration champions the
protection of unalienable rights like religious freedom, grounded in our nation’s
founding principles.”
A very small number of selected
individuals were awarded as “champions of religious freedom,” and among these
were Brazilian Ivanir dos Santos.
In its Twitter account, the State
Department said,
“Ivanir dos Santos of Brazil has
worked exhaustively to support interfaith dialogue, combat discrimination, and
create mechanisms for the protection of vulnerable groups.”
The political religious activism of Santos
was greatly strengthened during the administration of former President Luís
Inácio “Lula” da Silva, the most socialist and corrupt administration in the
Brazilian history.
His “interfaith dialogue” happens
basically with left-wing religious leaders, especially Rev. Marcos Amaral, a prominent
left-wing minister in the Presbyterian Church of Brazil. Amaral condones
homosexuality and marriage for this sin and he has openly criticized
conservative evangelicals who oppose special rights for homosexuality. It is a
perfect left-wing dialogue, because Afro-Brazilian religions are very
supportive of homosexuality and many of their priests are homosexuals.
Santos’ “interfaith dialogue” is based on
their shared left-wing views. So if Pompeo awarded Santos for his “interfaith
dialogue,” he awarded his left-wing activism.
Santos’ pro-witchcraft activism was
greatly supported by the Lula administration. So it makes no sense for the
Trump administration to award it.
The idea that sorcerers are persecuted by
Pentecostals has been promoted by the Big Left-Wing Media filled with hatred
and fake news against evangelicals. The socialist Lula administration gave full
support to sorcerers and the Big Left-Wing Media. Now Brazilian evangelicals see
the Trump administration, which is allegedly anti-Marxist, awarding a left-wing
sorcerer loved by the Big Left-Wing Media.
The Brazilian ambassador sent no complaint
to the Trump administration for insulting Brazilians and evangelicals in its award
to a sorcerer traditionally supported by Brazilian left-wingers. This award
would have received no complaint from the former socialist Lula administration,
which fervently supported the sorcerer and it would have just loved to see its
favorite sorcerer awarded. But the Trump administration did not bother to
offend Brazil and the Brazilian right-wing administration of President Jair
Bolsonaro did not care about being insulted.
It was a shameful act for the Trump administration
to award a Brazilian left-wing sorcerer. It was also a shameful act for the
Bolsonaro administration to remain silent when it should have condemned and
protested against the award.
The U.S. government awarding a sorcerer is
a nightmare you would expect to watch only in left-wing horror movies produced
by Hollywood to attack conservative Christians.
The Bolsonaro administration lost a big
opportunity not only to condemn the award, but also to condemn the past
socialist administrations in Brazil that supported and strengthened the
sorcerer and witchcraft.
In the 1990s, under Brazilian Marxist
President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the Ministry of Education instructed
Brazilian schools to address witchcraft, or Brazilian voodoo, as mere and
unharmful “culture.”
In the following decade, under the
socialist Lula administration, the Brazilian government advanced this
conception, by treating witchcraft adherents as “oppressed minorities” and by
treating Christian preaching against witchcraft as “hate crime.” The witchcraft
religions are mostly from Umbanda and Candomblé, very similar to Santeria and
voodoo.
The traditional Christian preaching
against witchcraft began to be labeled as “persecution” against “oppressed
minorities,” and witchcraft leaders were allowed to accompany the Brazilian
delegation in the United Nations to voice their denunciations against
“oppression” by Brazilian evangelicals against Umbanda and Candomblé adherents.
The
denunciations were made especially by Ivanir dos Santos, a “pai-de-santo” from
Rio de Janeiro. According to the Michaelis Dictionary,
“pai-de-santo is a priest of an Afro-Brazilian voodoo cult,” including Macumba
and Candomblé. Ivanir denounced at the United Nations “a new kind of religious
persecution in Brazil, which has aimed at temples of Candomble and the
followers of African religions, in acts provoked by modern Pentecostals.”
Brazil, said he, “is the only country preserving religions brought by slaves
and these religions should be defended.”
The “oppression” denounced by him consists
mostly of evangelical TV shows where former Umbanda and Candomblé adherents testify
about their past experiences in witchcraft and how Jesus Christ delivered them,
especially from demonic spirits.
They were not testimonies of Umbanda and
Candomblé adherents being murdered by evangelicals, especially from the
charismatic, Pentecostal neo-Pentecostal persuasion, but testimonies of them
being transformed by Jesus Christ.
These TV shows have suffered censorship. In
2014, YouTube videos containing testimonies of former adherents of
Afro-Brazilian religions who are Pentecostals today were removed by judicial
order, incited by Ivanir dos Santos. In his ruling, the judge stated that their
testimonies were not against a religion, but against a “culture.”
These judicial persecutions are not
against Pentecostals only.
In 1998, a judge in the state of Bahia,
Brazil, had ordered the confiscation of a book written by Catholic priest Jonas
Abib, in which he condemns witchcraft as immoral, as reported by LifeSiteNews,
which said:
“The book, ‘Yes, Yes! No, No! Reflections
on Healing and Liberation,’ warns readers against the dangers of the occult,
which includes the ‘Afro-Brazilian’ religions known as ‘spiritualism.’
According to Fr. Abib's website, the book has gone through 81 printings and has
sold over 400,000 copies. ‘Father Jonas, like Paul, dares to denounce works of
darkness, making the reader aware of mind control, yoga, astrology, magic, and
the invocation of the dead, revealing the truth about works of darkness, with
which it is urgently necessary to separate,’ says a summary of the book posted
on the same site. Public prosecutor Almiro Sena, however, has accused Abib
of ‘making false and prejudiced statements about the spiritualist religion as
well as religions from Africa, like Umbanda and Candomble, as well as a
flagrant incitement to destruction and disrespect for their objects of
worship.’ He added that the violation was more serious because ‘the State
Constitution (of Bahia) says that it is the obligation of the state to preserve
and guarantee the integrity, respectability, and permanence of the values of
Afro-Brazilian religion.’”
Former Lula administration and the Dilma
Rousseff administration (both the most socialist governments in the Brazilian
history) had active policies to protect Afro-Brazilian religions as a “culture”
inherited from African slaves. While Catholic and Protestant traditions have
increasingly been banned from schools and other government places because the
State is “secular,” Afro-Brazilian religions and their practices are making
inroads, with state assistance, into schools and other places, in a privileged
way. Because Christianity is religion, and Afro-Brazilian religions are
“culture.”
With such state protections, even
Brazilian blacks are banned from criticizing Afro-Brazilian gods, as reported
by me in WND:
“In Rio, a Pentecostal [Black] minister
led a criminal to Jesus and convinced him to deliver himself to police. Rev.
Isaías da Silva Andrade accompanied the former criminal to police and when they
asked how his life had been changed, the minister answered that the former
criminal lived under the influence of demons from Afro-Brazilian religions
which inspired him to criminal conduct, but now he found salvation in Jesus.
Because of this innocent account, Rev. Andrade is now being prosecuted for
discrimination against the Afro-Brazilian ‘culture’! If condemned, he will
serve between two and five years in jail.”
Brazilians remember, when there was no
threat of politically-correct racial censorship, the regular scandals reported
by media of pai-de-santos (Afro-Brazilian priests) involved in a number of
child sacrifices.
In the past, newspapers were free to
report and denounce child sacrifices in the Afro-Brazilian religions. You can
find a lot of old reports on these crimes involving child rapes and murders by
Afro-Brazilian priests. But nowadays, only flattering reports are allowed, such
as “oppressed” religion, “threatened” religion, etc.
Today, the Brazilian media no longer
reports Afro-Brazilian priests raping and sacrificing children. And they are
unwilling to talk about other related crimes.
When Pentecostal minister Francisco de
Paula Cunha de Miranda was stabbed to death by an Afro-Brazilian priest in
2008, the Brazilian media remained silent.
Miranda, 47,
was murdered in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. He was black (so he
cannot, even after his death, be accused of “racism”) and was on his 33rd day
of fasting and prayer when Afro-Brazilian priest Júlio César Bonato, possessed
by exu caveira (demon of death in the Afro-Brazilian “culture”), left his
temple during a ritual to go to the minister.
The priest returned to his ritual with his
ritualistic knife bloody.
The minister, who was very weak because of
the long fasting, was stabbed to death.
The Brazilian media has remained silent
about this horrific murder even today.
In 2010, a group of Umbanda adherents
stabbed to death another evangelical, Nilton Rodrigues, 34, and wounded others,
including an evangelical minister, João Carlos de Oliveira. The Brazilian Media
remained silent again.
I am worried that the special protection
afforded to Afro-Brazilian religions may have been reinforced by Condoleezza
Rice, a famous
daughter of an American Presbyterian minister. In 2008, she came to Brazil
to strengthen the roots of the Afro-Brazilian religions. Her example shows that
the Afro-Brazilian religions are now an international interest.
Afro-Brazilian practices that have always
been seen as witchcraft by the Brazilian society have increasingly been
protected by the Brazilian laws and media. And Christianity and its values have
increasingly lost protection and even been attacked by them.
I am not surprised that Brazil’s past
socialist administrations supported witchcraft. I would not be surprised if the
past administration of Barack Hussein Obama had supported it. But I am very
surprised that evangelical Mike Pompeo, under the right-wing administration of
Donald Trump, has supported it.
People could say that Pompeo did not know Ivanir
Santos was a sorcerer. But this would be a weak assessment, because Pompeo was the
CIA director, and I am sure that he was extensively assisted by aides who know
everything about Santos, including the color of his underpants.
About his meeting on July 2020 in the
Commission on Unalienable Rights, Pompeo said,
“Millions of people suffer extreme forms
of deprivation under harsh authoritarian regimes such as China, Iran, and
Russia. The Commission on Unalienable Rights Report reminds us of the urgent
need for the U.S. to champion human rights in our foreign policy.”
If the Trump administration had a real
interest on human rights, it would have condemned China in 2017, 2018 and 2019
for human rights abuses. But it did not do it. It is doing it now because both
are not getting along.
There is a large Jewish community in Russia,
but Saudi Arabia bans Jews from its territory. Even so, Pompeo has singled out
Russia as a major violator of human rights.
So Pompeo has politicized and downgraded
human rights to just neocon tools, to satisfy the U.S. commercial ambitions.
Other ways Pompeo has downgraded and politicized
human rights is the obsession of his State Department of continuing the legacy
of former State Secretary Hillary Clinton, who treated gay rights as human
rights. Pompeo’s State Department has celebrated the LGBTI “Pride” Month not
only in the U.S., but also in the U.S. embassies around the world.
Brazil and Russia do not execute
homosexuals; Saudi Arabia does it. But while the U.S. embassy in Saudi Arabia
has remained silent about execution and rights of homosexuals, the U.S.
embassies in Brazil and Russia have made homosexual propaganda a priority. This
is how Pompeo and his State Department have downgraded human rights to
advance the homosexual agenda not in Saudi Arabia, but in Brazil and
Russia.
In his article “America
Finds Its Mr. Rights” (a play on the words “America Finds Its Mr. Right”),
Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, praised Pompeo by saying,
“Pompeo’s project, the creation of a
Commission on Unalienable Rights, was a personal mission… to get back to the
real heart of human rights.”
Perkins is a member of the Commission on
Unalienable Rights established by Pompeo. He is, just as Pompeo and me, an
evangelical. Then here we are, three evangelicals, with two endorsing “unalienable
rights” downgrading human rights just to satisfy neocons, homosexualists and
Saudi Arabia.
To award a Brazilian left-wing sorcerer
who has a history of persecution against conservative evangelicals is not real
human rights. It is to downgrade human rights.
To impose the gay agenda through the U.S.
embassy in Russia when Russia protects children from homosexual propaganda, but
to spare Saudi Arabia when Saudis execute homosexuals, is to downgrade human
rights.
Perkins should forcefully speak up about
the human rights abuses that Pompeo’s State Department is committing by
downgrading real human rights, but he
has remained silent.
Pompeo thinks that his downgrading of
human rights represents the values of Protestant men who founded America. Does
he actually think that they were busy awarding sorcerers and imposing gay propaganda
in other nations?
In 2019 Mike Pompeo shared
his testimony at the Christian Counselors Conference, where he said: “I ask
God for direction in my work.”
I do not know if Pompeo is understanding
correctly God’s clear directions in his Word.
The Trump administration owes an apology
to Brazil for awarding a left-wing sorcerer and celebrating LGBTI “Pride” Month
in its embassy in Brazil.
The Trump administration owes an apology
to Russia for celebrating LGBTI “Pride” Month in its embassy in Moscow.
And the Trump administration owes the
American people an apology for granting impunity to Saudi Arabia and its
radical Islam for its many crimes against the U.S. and Christians around the
world.
With information from Zenit, U.S.
Embassy in Brazil and Family Research Council.
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