Tag Archives: influence

Thought Crimes: Silent prayers could land you in a UK jail cell for ‘influencing’ someone out of an abortion

Important Takeaways:

  • While many already knew about the “thought crime” case against a British Army veteran, Vice President JD Vance brought it to the world’s attention again in a speech to the Munich Security Conference on February 14.
  • “A little over two years ago, the British government charged Adam Smith-Connor, a 51-year-old physiotherapist and an army veteran with the heinous crime of standing 50 meters from an abortion clinic and silently praying for three minutes, not obstructing anyone, not interacting with anyone, just silently praying on his own,” Vance said.
  • Smith-Connor was convicted last fall of praying within an abortion clinic “buffer zone.” When he was approached by police officers, they asked, “What is the nature of your prayer today?”
  • Smith-Connor answered, “What is the nature of my prayer? I’m praying for my son,” making the charge against him what many are calling a “thought crime.”  We met Smith-Connor at a church in Southampton, England, where he told us of a dream that led him into the pro-life movement, a dream in which he was butchering a baby.
  • He recounted, “I was carving up this baby, as if I was carving up a Sunday roast. I didn’t have any sense of guilt or anything, and it was no feeling of anything as I was doing this. When I woke up, it was like a nightmare in reverse. I was so horrified because I had carved up this child who I knew was my son. And it horrified me that I hadn’t felt anything as I did it. And over the following days, I came to realize it related to an abortion that I’d paid for two decades earlier. That abortion hadn’t even crossed my mind. But God knew that that was sitting on my conscience. He knew that I wasn’t going to figure out for myself and that that needed to be cleansed. So, I feel that he gave me that vision, that dream, to wake me up to what had happened.”
  • He began to go to abortion clinics to pray for his son and would eventually be charged with a crime for praying.
  • Smith-Connor said police officers “decided from that because they knew that my son had died in an abortion, that therefore, I was in breach of the buffer zone. And they asked me to leave the area. I declined because I don’t think that prayer can ever be considered a criminal act or Illegal. I didn’t approach anyone. I didn’t speak to anyone. Didn’t even look at anyone. And in fact, if you’ve been in the clinic, you wouldn’t have seen me from the clinic because I was behind a tree, out of line of sight of the clinic entrance.”
  • Lois McLatchie Miller with Alliance Defending Freedom International says the government’s use of the word “influence” has created a very broad law that can potentially be used against private conversations and even a person’s thoughts and prayers.
  • Miller told us, “By using a word like ‘influence,’ it’s very unclear what the law means. What about a mother asking her daughter, ‘Are you sure?’ Is that an ‘influence’? What about a friend who’s offering support to a woman who’s considering continuing her pregnancy? Is that ‘influence’?”
  • Livia Tossici-Bolt, a 63-year-old retired medical scientist from Bournemouth, England, was also convicted under the law last week for holding up a sign reading “here to talk, if you want” within an abortion clinic buffer zone and talking to women who approached her.
  • In Scotland, citizens living within buffer zones were sent letters warning that they could violate the law while inside their own homes. Some think it could include praying near a window if a woman seeking an abortion walks by.
  • Adam Smith-Connor said he’s grateful to Vice President JD Vance for defending him before world leaders.
  • Smith-Connor is a British Army vet who risked his life in Afghanistan. This case makes him reflect on the personal price he paid for freedom and a close friend who died to protect the very rights that his government is now taking away.
  • “I’ve got a profound sense of sadness for our nation. The fact that we have plummeted to such a depth so quickly is truly shocking to me. I believe in the Bible and what the Bible says, and I live that out in my life. And when the civil laws step outside of the laws of God, then I’m to follow God’s laws. And the absurdity of being put on trial for the contents of your mind, the contents of your prayers. It just has no place in a liberal, free, democratic society.”
  • “And yet, here we are.”
  • An appeal of Adam’s conviction has been set for July.

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Ukraine moves to split church from Russia as elections approach

FILE PHOTO: A general view shows a bell tower and domes of the Kiev Pechersk Lavra monastery in Kiev, Ukraine January 22, 2017. REUTERS/Gleb Garanich/File Photo

By Natalia Zinets

KIEV (Reuters) – Ukraine’s Orthodox church could become independent of Moscow under the terms of a presidential initiative lawmakers approved on Thursday, a move that President Petro Poroshenko said would make it harder for Russia to meddle in Ukrainian affairs.

Ukraine’s pro-Western leaders have sought step by step to move the former Soviet republic out of Russia’s orbit, after Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula in 2014 and a Moscow-backed insurgency broke out in eastern Ukraine.

The Moscow Patriarchate is part of the Russian Orthodox Church and has a sizeable following in Ukraine. Kiev considers it a tool for the Kremlin to wield influence.

Poroshenko met Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, the spiritual leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians, in Istanbul last week, to seek support for giving autocephalous status – effectively, making it independent – to the Ukrainian church.

“Unity is our main weapon in the fight against the Russian aggressor,” Poroshenko told parliament. “This question goes far beyond the ecclesiastical. It is about our finally acquiring independence from Moscow.”

Poroshenko compared having an autocephalous church to Kiev’s aspirations to join the European Union and NATO, “because the Kremlin regards the Russian church as one of the key tools of influence over Ukraine.”

Asked about the issue on his daily conference call with reporters, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quoted by Russian state media as saying:

“Of course, actions aimed at splitting up the churches are unlikely to be supported and unlikely to be welcomed.”

A spokesman at Patriarch Bartholomew’s office declined comment. Poroshenko has previously suggested he has the Patriarch’s support for an independent church but could not divulge many details about their meeting.

The Moscow Patriarchate sees itself as the only legitimate Orthodox church in Ukraine. It vies for influence with the Kiev Patriarchate, a branch of the Orthodox Church that broke away from Moscow in 1992 after the fall of the Soviet Union, and other Orthodox and Catholic denominations.

The Kiev Patriarchate’s leader has been sharply critical of Russian President Vladimir Putin and in 2014 called him possessed by Satan.

Putin in turn has cultivated strong ties with the Russian Orthodox Church, adopting more conservative policies and prompting critics to suggest the line separating state and church has become blurred.

Thursday’s parliamentary motion was opposed by the Opposition Bloc, the heir to the party once headed by the pro-Russian former president Viktor Yanukovich. The party called the move a gambit by Poroshenko ahead of elections next year.

“We believe that the presidential campaign began today,” its leader, Yuriy Boyko, said. “The bad news is that the presidential campaign begins with the most sensitive topic for society – the issue of religion. The state has no right to interfere in religious matters.”

(Additional reporting by Ali Kucukgocmen in Istanbul; Writing by Matthias Williams; Editing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg)

More Russian cyber attacks on elections ‘likely’: U.S. intelligence chief

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Christopher Wray; Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director Mike Pompeo; and Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Dan Coats testify before a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on "World Wide Threats" on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., February 13, 2018. REUTERS/Leah Millis

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said on Tuesday that Russia, as well as other foreign entities, were “likely” to pursue more cyber attacks on U.S. and European elections.

“Persistent and disruptive cyber operations will continue against the United States and our European allies using elections as opportunities to undermine democracy,” Coats said at an annual Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on worldwide threats.

(Reporting by Patricia Zengerle and Doina Chiacu; Editing by Bernadette Baum)

CIA director expects Russia will try to target U.S. mid-term elections

CIA Director Mike Pompeo delivers remarks at "Intelligence Beyond 2018," a forum hosted by the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, in Washington, U.S., January 23, 2018.

LONDON (Reuters) – CIA Director Mike Pompeo said Russia will target U.S. mid-term elections later this year as part of the Kremlin’s attempt to influence domestic politics across the West, and warned the world had to do more to push back against Chinese meddling.

Russia has been accused of meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating the allegations, which Moscow denies, and whether there was any collusion involving President Donald Trump’s associates.

In an interview with the BBC aired on Tuesday, U.S. intelligence chief Pompeo said Russia had a long history of information campaigns and said its threat would not go away.

Asked if Russia would try to influence the mid-term elections, he said: “Of course. I have every expectation that they will continue to try and do that.

“But I am confident that America will be able to have a free and fair election. That we’ll push back in a way that is sufficiently robust that the impact they have on our election won’t be great.”

He also said the Chinese posed a threat of equal concern, and were “very active” with a world class cyber capability.

“We can watch very focused efforts to steal American information, to infiltrate the United States with spies, with people who are going to work on behalf of the Chinese government against America,” he said.

“We see it in our schools, in our hospitals and medical systems, we see it throughout corporate America. These efforts we have to all be more focused on. We have to do better at pushing back against Chinese efforts to covertly influence the world.”

GLOBAL INFLUENCE

The Kremlin, which under Vladimir Putin has clawed back some of the global influence lost when the Soviet Union collapsed, has denied meddling in elections in the West. It says anti-Russian hysteria is sweeping through the United States and Europe.

In the interview, Pompeo also repeated his message that North Korea was close to developing missiles which could be used in a nuclear attack on the United States.

“I think that we collectively, the United States and our intelligence partners around the world, have developed a pretty clear understanding of (North Korean leader) Kim Jong Un’s capability,” he said.

“We talk about him having the ability to deliver a nuclear weapon to the United States in a matter of a handful of months.”

The CIA chief defended Trump over accusations from a book which suggested the president was unfocused, unprepared and unfit for his office.

“It’s absurd, the claim that the president isn’t engaged and doesn’t have a grasp on these important issues is dangerous and false,” Pompeo said.

Asked if Trump’s use of Twitter posed any national security issues, he said: “Hasn’t caused us any trouble.”

He added: “We deliver nearly every day, personally, to the president the most exquisite truth that we know from the CIA. Whatever the facts may be we deliver them unvarnished as accurately and as forcefully as we can.”

(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge, editing by Michael Holden and Janet Lawrence)