President Obama, once again, gave the false impression that the annual National Prayer Breakfast is a White House-sponsored event. In fact, the event was borne out of post-World War I anti-labor activism by fascist-oriented businessmen and conservative Protestant religious leaders in Seattle.
Today, the prayer breakfast serves as an umbrella for the Central Intelligence Agency, top U.S. military systems production firms, and foreign leaders to meet under the guise of “praying to Jesus.” Past attendees have included members of the Saudi royal family who stand accused of financing Al Qaeda and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In 1988, Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Saud, read passages from the Koran at the National Prayer Breakfast. Bandar is identified in the missing 28-pages from the Senate Intelligence Committee report on the failures of pre-9/11 intelligence as a major financier of the alleged hijackers. This has been corroborated by Zacarias Moussaoui, the jailed so-called “20th hijacker.”
The National Prayer Breakfast sponsor, the shadowy tax-exempt Fellowship Foundation of Arlington, Virginia, which counts a number of Republican and Democratic senators and representatives, in addition to Hillary Clinton, among its flock, is headed up by Douglas Coe, a one-time youth camp counselor in Oregon.
This year’s prayer breakfast featured Obama greeting from the podium the Dalai Lama of Tibet, who was sitting in the front row at the event in the grand ball room of the Washington Hilton hotel. Obama referred to the Dalai Lama as his “good friend.” This gesture infuriated China, which regards the Dalai Lama as a feudalistic separatist. However, the prayer breakfast theatrics, which included presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett personally greeting the Dalai Lama, was designed to ratchet up already frayed relations between the United States and China. Neocons in the Obama administration, of which there are many, decided to stoke the embers of the Cold War by confronting both Russia and China, politically, economically, and militarily. This year, Coe, whose Arlington headquarters is in a colonial mansion once owned by Howard Hughes and used by the CIA as a safe house, did not disappoint his military-intelligence community masters. The Dalai Lama-Obama public encounter had its desired effect on Beijing and Asia geopolitics.
Dubbed the “Christian Mafia” by this editor in a lengthy article in May 2005, the Fellowship uses Jesus as a corporate icon and a tax-free device to lure Washington’s power elite and global leaders to contrivances like the National Prayer Breakfast. For the Fellowship Foundation, “Jesus” is merely a business logo in the same manner as the “golden arches” are for McDonald’s and the British-accented talking gecko is for GEICO.
One of the most frequent attendees of the breakfast has been Rwanda’s brutal dictator Paul Kagame, who has used the event to coordinate his guerrilla activities in the Democratic Republic of Congo with Uganda’s dictator Yoweri Museveni and the DRC’s Joseph Kabila.
This year’s prayer breakfast also featured African intrigue on its sidelines. Among the attendees was Sudanese Foreign Minister Ali Ahmed Karti, accused by national security adviser Susan Rice’s friends in the George Soros-supported human rights community of carrying out genocide in Darfur. Also in attendance was Ibrahim Ghandour, adviser to Sudan President Omar al-Bashir. The International Criminal Court has indicted Bashir for war crimes in Darfur.
The committing of war crimes does not keep one out of the prayer breakfast as evidenced by the frequent attendance of Kagame and Museveni. Scheduled to attend this year’s breakfast was Jordan’s King Abdullah. Although he was in Washington for the event, the king flew back to Jordan in the aftermath of the Islamic State’s burning to death in a cage of Jordanian air force pilot Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh, who hailed from a prominent tribe in the south of Jordan. There are already questions about the video of the burning, which was aired in full by Fox News. The video was actually released via the auspices of the Washington-based front for Mossad, the Search for International Terrorist Entities (SITE) Institute. SITE is run by the Islamophobe and anti-Arab Iraqi-born Jew, Rita Katz, who once coordinated her activities with the discredited Stephen Emerson.
Emerson recently told Fox News that Birmingham, England was a “no-go zone” for non-Muslims. Fox later issued multiple apologies for Emerson’s nonsensical statement. Katz always manages to “discover” gruesome Islamic State beheadings of hostages and other inciting videos from the Internet. A number of Middle East observers believe that the Islamic State videos are slick Mossad productions geared at further stoking the flames of violence in the Arab Middle East.
This editor’s familiarity with Katz’s previous interactions with the U.S. government is very instructive when it comes to her ability to twist and turn facts to advance the interests of Israel. Creating bogus videos would be among the least of Katz’s outrages.
In any event, the murder of Kaseasbeh and the cancellation of King Abdullah’s speech at the prayer breakfast provided the type of drama that Coe relishes in. Obama used the murder of the Jordanian pilot to address the issue of religious violence. Obama likened current Islamic State practices to those of the Christian Crusade and Inquisition, which provided fodder for right-wing Christian fundamentalists to attack Obama. However, these same fundamentalists fail to realize that the National Prayer Breakfast, itself, brings together some of the world’s worst perpetrators of burning people alive or blowing them apart. At past breakfasts, Lockheed Martin and Boeing executives “prayed” alongside such bloodthirsty dictators as Kagame, Museveni, Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf, El Salvador death squad leader Roberto d’Aubisson, Guatemalan dictator and evangelical Efrain Rios Montt, and Nicaraguan leader Anastasio Somoza, the latter a personal friend of Coe.
Once the world’s dictators “pray” to Jesus at the prayer breakfast, they get down to the real business of “Jesus”—signing lucrative weapons deals with the Jesus-praying defense industry CEOs present at the breakfast.
Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.
Copyright © 2015 WayneMadenReport.com
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).
