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.
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.
As in the case of homosexuality, mere criticism of Brazilian voodoo is treated as “prejudice, bias, discrimination, intolerance,” etc. Now, even Catholic books criticizing them are banned.
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.”
I agree with Pompeo singling out China, who persecutes millions of Christians. But the U.S. is condemning China today just because both nations are not getting along. In the first year of his administration, 2017, Trump visited China and in 2019, Trump congratulated China for its communist revolution that murdered millions of people.
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.
If Pompeo can blacklist Iran, why not Saudi Arabia? There are about 245 million Christians facing Islamic violence or oppression around the world, especially from Sunni Islam. The capital of Sunni Islam is Saudi Arabia, but even so Pompeo has singled out Iran, not Saudi Arabia.
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.Even if compared to Iran, Saudi Arabia is worse. But Pompeo especially blacklisted Iran, not Saudi Arabia.
In fact, most Islamic terrorist attacks against the United States were perpetrated by Saudi Muslims. But the U.S. stubbornly refuses to blacklist Saudis and just lets them escape unpunished for one reason: Saudi Arabia is the biggest buyer of U.S. weapons. So it is no wonder that the first nation that Trump visited in his first international trip was Saudi Arabia. And as CIA director, Pompeo visited Saudi Arabia in 2017 to award them for its “war on terror.”
So Pompeo has politicized and downgraded human rights to just neocon tools, to satisfy the U.S. commercial ambitions.
The U.S. knows that it is not easy to confront Saudi Arabia over its human rights abuses. When Canada confronted Saudi Arabia over such abuses in 2018, Saudi Arabia expelled the Canadian ambassador.
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.
The U.S. Embassy in Moscow defiantly celebrated LGBT “Pride” Month in Russia.
The U.S. Embassy in Brazil Celebrated LGBTI “Pride” Day.
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.