Serbian Orthodox Church bishop Nikanor Bogunović of Bana. (Screen capture via YouTube)
A senior bishop in Serbia has been condemned for encouraging armed attacks against an LGBTQ+ Pride event in Belgrade.
In September, the Serbian capital will host EuroPride, which celebrates LGBTQ+ rights across the continent, in a first for a southeastern European country.
But Serbian Orthodox Church bishop Nikanor Bogunović of Banat, a region that covers parts of Serbia, Romania and Hungary, has vowed to “curse” all those who attend the week-long festival.
“I will curse all those who organize and participate in something like that,” Nikanor said in remarks made on 11 August, according to Balkan Insight.
“I can do that much. If I had a weapon, I would use it, I would use that force if only I had it, but I do not.”
He added that EuroPride participants “will come to Belgrade and flaunt and desecrate the city of Belgrade, the holy Serbian city,” and that “we raise our voice against such [people]”.
Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić said Nicanor’s sermon had another clear target – the country’s lesbian prime minister, Ana Brnabić, elected in 2017.
“Bishop Nicanor insulted himself and our church, humiliated our church, much more than Ana Brnabić or anyone else ever did,” he told TV network Prva TV on 12 August.
Only three days after Nikanor’s comments, chants of “Hands off our children” and “Stop the parade of shame” boomed through the streets of Belgrade as part of a protest against EuroPride.
Tens of thousands of people gathered outside Serbian Orthodox Church Patriarchate offices before ending at the Sain Marko Church. The demonstration was backed by the Serbian Orthodox Church, according to local media reports.
Queer Serbs do enjoy some protections in the eyes of the law, but same-gender couples are not legally recognised and marriage equality remains firmly banned by the constitution.
Serbia’s prime minister Ana Brnabić (2-R) at Belgrade Pride in 2017. (ANDREJ ISAKOVIC/AFP via Getty Images)
The knock-on effect of this is easy to see. Almost 60 per cent of LGBTQ+ Serbs have reported physical or emotional abuse in the course of a year, according to a 2020 report by the human rights group Center for Research and Development of Society IDEAS.
So for a high-ranking religious figure like Nikanor to call congregants for arms wasn’t exactly unexpected to some activists.
“It’s deeply disturbing to see a bishop incite armed violence against the LGBTQ+ community, however, it’s not surprising,” Nik Jovčić-Sas, a British-Serbian LGBTQ+ activist, told PinkNews.
“The Serbian Orthodox Church’s response to the queer and trans community for the past 20 years has been one of implicit and explicit violence.”
Jovčić-Sas said the first Belgrade Pride ever held in 2001 has come to be known as “Крви Прајд, ‘the bloody Pride’, for its extreme violence”.
Football hooligans joined right-wing nationalists to beat up and stone Pride-goers wishing to celebrate who they are. The violence only ended when police fired in the air to disperse the seething crowds.
The haunting scene was repeated nearly a decade later in 2010 when the second Belgrade Pride was held. Thugs tore through the march, lobbing Molotov cocktails, bricks, stones, glass bottles and firecrackers at Pride-goers and police in a protest egged on by religious leaders.
More than 100 people were arrested after the office of the ruling Democratic Party was set on fire and at least one shot was fired in clashes with the police.
“The church has always allowed itself to be the heart of the country’s most virulent anti-queer campaigns,” Jovčić-Sas added.
“However considering that he has not condemned Bishop Nikanor for his comments and allowed the church to be the rallying point for this weekend’s anti-Pride march,” Jovčić-Sas said, “I am not optimistic we will see any change from this Patriarch.”
This is what we face in future elections. No republican candidate will admit they lost even to other republicans. No republican candidate will accept reality and will use threats and intimidation to get what they want. Power before truth. But worse there is now a bunch of these maga cult members in charge of the elections going forward. They believe in the ability to simply deny the votes of the public to put their preferred candidate in office. Scary. Hugs
The Republican nominee for secretary of state in Arizona is a self-proclaimed member of the far-right extremist group the Oath Keepers who repeatedly shared anti-government conspiracies and posts about stockpiling ammunition on social media. CNN’s KFile team uncovered previously unreported posts from Mark Finchem, an Arizona state representative who won his party’s nomination with the endorsement of former President Donald Trump, on several social media websites linked from his since-deleted former Twitter account.
The posts included a Pinterest account with a “Treason Watch List,” and pins of photos of Barack Obama alongside imagery of a man clad in Nazi attire making a Nazi salute; Finchem also shared photos of the Holocaust claiming it could happen in the United States. On Twitter, he shared conspiracies that multiple ships docked at a Virginia naval station might be a target for a second Pearl Harbor-type attack. He said Satan ruled the United States and said gun ownership should be mandatory.
Finchem first appeared on JMG when he declared that COVID does not exist and that everybody who got the “poisonous” vaccine will be dead within two years. The January 6th committee has subpoenaed him for his role as a fake Arizona elector.
Arizona Republican secretary of state nominee kept 'Treason Watch List' and posted about stockpiling ammunition on Pinterest, @KFILE @emsteck report https://t.co/PQxsUPCuuh
We’re about to end up with large portions of the country being run by those with no interest, experience or qualifications whatsoever in actually doing the jobs they will have been elected to do. And who are mentally unhinged enough to do great damage to everything as they flail about in destructive rampages.
This is what happens when a major political party decides that being loyal to the party matters more than absolutely anything else.
It’s what happens when fascism rises. In my readings about the rise of fascism in Italy, Germany and Spain, I keep seeing these kinds of scenarios again and again. It’s all about taking power, looting the state and persecuting minorities.
Political commentators have observed this: Today’s Republican Party is rudderless. It has no “policy agenda,” no long-range goals for the future. It merely exists to serve tyrants like Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis.
Another_steve shoos away the cat and reaches clumsily for his glass of chardonnay…
Joe Walsh — a former Republican congressman who’s seen the light and is now a Biden supporter — said something on cable the other day that’s stuck with me. He seems to have good “radar” when it comes to this stuff. Has a good sense of what the Republican electorate is like today.
He estimates that something like 85% of all Republican voters believe everything that Donald Trump says. You name it. Everything. However outlandish.
These treasonous criminals — like Finchem — who have Trump’s support may very well win in November.
“More questions are being raised this morning. Did former President Trump try to sell or share the highly classified material to the Russians or to the Saudis or others?
“Or were the documents innocently mishandled and stored because he thought he had a legal right to have them?
“And Russia’s state media already is claiming that Russian officials have seen the material. Empty boasts or has there been a leak that officials fear could pose a grave danger to the United States security?
“How would they get this if it’s under lock and key or was it? Because the Feds apparently told them back in June that you got to put all padlock on that on the storage room.
“We don’t know where this stuff was floating around.” – Fox News host Eric Shawn.
Ask yourself the question: “Can he get any money for the documents ? Then think about what the Orange twat would do — would he care that by selling them he’d be a traitor or would he rather be that much richer ? Evil traitor or Cash in the pocket ???
Fox is cutting TFG loose, they’re going to throw their adulation towards DeathSantis, you watch he’ll start appearing on all their ‘shows’ soon and they’ll start pushing his agendas.
We are learning that the DOJ had video recordings of the storage area that caused them a lot of concern. We see that these documents are very valuable to a foreign government. Imagine the damage to nation security this information about who is a spy could cause. The fact that trump is this careless with national secrets of the highest level really shows he shouldn’t ever have been president and must never be again. Nor should any of his maga supporters in any elected office at any level. It is well known that trump is in money troubles and that he faces over 600 million dollars of loans coming due this next year. How much would any government give him for the spy information or the nation’s nuclear secrets? Hugs
In pursuing the unprecedented search of Donald Trump’s residence on Monday, the FBI was seeking to retrieve Top Secret and “compartmented” documents dealing with intelligence “sources and methods,” two federal government sources tell Newsweek—documents with the potential to reveal U.S. intelligence sources, including human sources on the American government payroll.
This greatly complicates any public discussion of the documents or any substantiation of Trump’s potential violation of U.S. law. The sources, who were briefed on the investigation, requested anonymity in order to discuss sensitive information.
I read where tRump threatened Garland, saying he was making some of tRump’s friends very angry. Literally mob-like threats. He has all kinds of knowledge that he can use to blackmail the government and keep them from prosecuting him. He is the biggest threat to our democracy in American history.
I know he’s a shit bag and a nasty individual, but this… this level of espionage shocked and saddened me. At this point I don’t know why I’m shocked, but I’m definitely sad…
What’s worse is the 30% of the country defending him… declaring that serial liar Trump has more credibility that the entirety of the US government’s national security and intelligence apparatus.
They rest easy in the comfort of that security while they cheer Trump’s attempts to tear it all down.
This will get real ugly real quick. Most Republicans backed themselves in a corner, and actually do not support treason. But their lip flapping and now the evidence is going to put them in a quandary, and just before the midterms. Which is always a good thing.
Trump possibly could’ve had foreign powers look at those documents or he could’ve transmitted those documents to foreign powers. This is the very definition of treason.
If the Democrats are smart, and they usually are not, this would be the question they would ask their constituents. Is it OK to support a candidate who commits treason? There will always be the few who do. But the majority will not.
At least one lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump signed a written statement in June asserting that all material marked as classified and held in boxes in a storage area at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and club had been returned to the government, four people with knowledge of the document said. The written declaration was made after a visit on June 3 to Mar-a-Lago by Jay I. Bratt, the top counterintelligence official in the DOJ’s national security division.
The existence of the signed declaration, which has not previously been reported, is a possible indication that Mr. Trump or his team were not fully forthcoming with federal investigators about the material. And it could help explain why a potential violation of a criminal statute related to obstruction was cited by the department as one basis for seeking the warrant used to carry out the daylong search of the former president’s home on Monday.
NEW: At least one lawyer for Trump signed a written statement for the Justice Department asserting all docs with classified markings in the boxes had been returned after a June 3 meeting, which could explain why "obstruction" statute was listed on warrant https://t.co/JKTTvk2a5H
The Justice Department also saw something on surveillance footage that had been subpoenaed of the storage area that concerned them. It was unclear what period of time the footage was from https://t.co/JKTTvk2a5H
Trump said Friday that he had declassified all the material in his possession while he was still president. He provided no documentation to back the statement https://t.co/JKTTvk2a5H
Ari Melber offered a pretty good summary of how Trump’s defiant bluster in the media quickly turns to meek acceptance once he realizes he’s really in a tough place… to wit, his pathetic pleading the fifth last week.
In that context, this situation will be fun to watch.
Armed maga thugs, trump brownshirts, with the intent to intimidate the ones they are against / hate which in this case is law enforcement. They did this to school board meetings over masks and Covid precautions, they have done this to the drag queen story hours, they have done this to schools / libraries over LGBTQ+ materials. This is what open carry means to them. The power to make others fearful. They are the enforcement arm of the republican party, and the party loves to support them and to aim them at their enemies. Scary and it is going to get worse. Hugs
Signs reading “Honor your oath” and “Abolish FBI” were seen outside the FBI office in Phoenix on Aug. 13, just days after news broke that the agency searched former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida. Several of those who were there were armed with guns.
FBI agents seized classified records from Trump’s home during the agency’s unprecedented raid on Aug. 8, including some marked as top secret, according to a warrant and property receipt. Trump disputes the classification, saying the records have been declassified.
Dangerously deceived by disinformation: Armed Trump supporters protest outside of FBI office in Phoenix following Mar-a-Lago probe @FBIPhoenix https://t.co/6bGOAnlxL2
NEW: Armed Donald Trump supporters have gathered outside the Phoenix, Arizona, FBI office after what they call the "unlawful" search of Mar-a-Lago. #azleghttps://t.co/hpG34rNBFp
There are steps that must be taken to declassify material and it cannot be done with a standing order, handwaving, or trump bellowing “Mine, my precious”. In fact the president cannot declassify some nuclear secrets. Also remember that trump lost both the clearance a president has and his right to intelligence briefings because Biden said he was erratic. The fact is this is a national security matter. He had these documents that were highly classified improperly stored and he is known to be associating with two foreign government that desperately want those documents, Russia and Saudi Arabia. Some of the documents are so secret thatthe FBI plans to dust them for prints. Hugs
Former President Donald Trump in the Oval Office.
Trump’s new explanation for Mar-a-Lago documents is that “everyone ends up having to bring home their work from time to time.”
Trump claimed he had a “standing order” to declassify documents “the moment” they left the Oval Office.
The DOJ is investigating whether Trump broke three laws when he took government records to Mar-a-Lago.
Former President Donald Trump said that everyone takes work home sometimes, as he sought to develop a new line to explain why top secret government documents were stored at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida.
“As we can all relate to, everyone ends up having to bring home their work from time to time. American presidents are no different,” said the statement from Trump’s office on Friday night read out on Fox News.
Trump further claimed that he had a “standing order” to declassify documents “the moment” they left the Oval Office.
“President Trump, in order to prepare for work the next day, often took documents, including classified documents, from the Oval Office to the residence. He had a standing order that documents removed from the Oval Office and taken into the residence were deemed to be declassified the moment he removed them,” the statement said.
It claimed that the power to classify and declassify documents rests solely with the president and that he did not need approval from a “paper-pushing bureaucrat.”
This new defense – portraying Trump as just another hard-working American – contradicts previous statements by Trump and his lawyers that baselessly claimed the FBI could have planted evidence while on site.
While the president has the authority to declassify documents, legal experts say they must follow a defined procedure. It is not clear if Trump ever did.
“He can’t just wave a wand and say it’s declassified,” Richard Immerman, a historian and an assistant deputy director of national intelligence in the Obama administration, told NBC News. “There has to be a formal process. That’s the only way the system can work.”
Immerman noted that declassified documents are marked with the date they were declassified. It is not the case with some of the documents returned from Mar-a-Lago to the National Archives this year, per NBC.
When reports of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago emerged in May, former Trump administration official Kash Patel claimed that Trump had declassified the files shortly before leaving office but that the classified markings had not been removed.
One of the laws relates to removing information about the US’s national defense, and the other two relate to the concealment or destruction of government records.
The possible crimes being investigated do not depend on the classification of the documents.
“Because the Espionage Act speaks in terms of national defense information, it leaves open the possibility that such information could be unclassified as long as an agency is still taking steps to protect it from disclosure,” Steven Aftergood, who runs the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, told The New York Times.
I think this is the 6th or 7th different spin they’ve tried to give. https://t.co/u5jyPL2UAi
What's so great is that Fox News trots out John Solomon, who conspired with Russian intelligence in the 2020 election, to comment on an espionage case. 😂 https://t.co/aPPWgAEo7X
Wait — didn't @JesseBWatters tell us a few hours ago the FBI planted the documents? Now we're told by MAGA-FOX that yes –Trump stole the documents, but he waved his hand over them and declared "YOU ARE NOW DECLASSIFIED" (even though that's not how documents are declassified)? https://t.co/RF06CJEcN0
Just asked a former senior administration official who would be in a position to know about such a thing and they had absolutely no idea what this report is talking about https://t.co/ucEXaHdblg
I didn’t take any documents Okay, I took documents but they weren’t classified Okay, they were top secret but I declassified them Look over there, Obama took 30 million documents with him!
Scottie's Playtime 