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On March 13, 2013, Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina was elected by the College of Cardinals to succeed Jozef Ratzinger as pope.

Pope Francis was the third non-Italian, after Karol Wotyla of Poland and the aforementioned Ratzinger, to lead the church in over 500 years. There was a great deal of celebration and expectation at his elevation to the papacy, including from this columnist.

Unfortunately, the honeymoon didn’t last very long.

Fairly early into his papacy, Francis began to do and say things that sent up trigger warnings to those of us in the American church who didn’t like his “who am I to judge” stance. We thought that if he, the leader of the church, wasn’t prepared to make judgments on sin and virtue, good and evil, who was?

We were accused of being mummified traditionalists who didn’t understand the needs of an evolving society.

That usually means two things: the church needs to lighten up on the sexual issues and start hiring women for the white (as in Roman) collar jobs.

And Francis began to give the progressives in the church reason to think he was one of them. In recent years, he has abandoned the nuance of his earlier comments and launched himself fully into political attacks.

He initiated a mini-feud with Donald Trump, calling his immigration policies “anti-Christian,” something he’d never mentioned when Obama was earning a reputation as “deporter in chief,” and suggested that Trump’s anti-abortion efforts were hypocritical because of his opposition to DACA.

It’s fine to criticize politicians because of their politics, but consistency would be nice from the gentleman occupying the rock of Peter.

For example, accusing a Republican U.S. president of being anti-Christian while expressing sorrow at the death of a pretty bad Cuban dictator seems a bit tone-deaf.

When Fidel Castro happily expired, the Pope sent a telegram to his brother Raul lamenting the “sad news” and offering “my sentiments of sorrow.”

Given the fact that this pope grew up under the various Peron regimes in a country that gave Cuba one of its greatest heroes, the murderous Che Guevara, you’d think he’d want to dial back the matcha tea and sympathy for bloodthirsty dictators.

I tried to be open-minded over the years.

When Francis visited Philadelphia in 2015 during the World Meeting of Families, I helped with the preparations and was appointed by our local archdiocese to act as a liaison for immigrant issues.

I wrote several columns praising his efforts on behalf of refugees, including one where I observed that he was “reminding us that the immigrant experience helped create the dream that we hold as our birthright.”

And I went on to praise his dedication to unborn life.

Why am I quoting myself?

I think it’s partly to convince you that I haven’t always been opposed to this pope and his agenda, and partly to convince myself of the same thing. It’s been such a long time since this man has spoken for me.

His embrace of pro-abortion public Catholics like Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi is just the most obvious insult. But it goes beyond that.

Pope Francis seems, I almost hesitate to say it, mean-spirited.

He silences critics with surprising speed, given the normally glacial moves of the Vatican.

He has a particular dislike for traditional prelates, like Bishop Strickland and Cardinal Burke. He gave no support to Cardinal Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco when he censured Pelosi for her pro-abortion advocacy, and has basically taken the same old “who am I to judge” approach on this crucial human rights issue.

He’s also been dismissive of Catholics who embrace the Latin Mass, making it seem as if they were knuckle draggers from pre-Vatican II.

And then he comes out with morally relativistic comments about the suffering in Israel and Palestine, ignoring the fact that all of the victims can be attributed to the terrorism of Hamas and their radical brothers.

When I was in Rome last week, I talked to a few Italians who candidly told me this pope was too political for them.

It felt good to know that this wasn’t just an American phenomenon and that even some of his neighbors weren’t happy.

It’s so easy to write this off as a liberal-conservative problem, in the simplistic way Americans tend to view conflict.

It’s more than that. It’s about feeling alienated from the very person who is supposed to hold you in his embrace.

Ten years on, that embrace seems terribly lukewarm.

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Copyright 2023 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

I wrote this column in view of the Arno River, celebrated in operas, paintings and literature.

My ears were filled with the tones of my ancestors’ Italian, and my Thanksgiving dinner was … pizza.

It’s only the second time in 61 years I wasn’t sitting around a table with family and friends, giving thanks.

The first time was 40 years ago during my junior year in Paris.

Back then, my father was dying of cancer, I was homesick and there wasn’t much to celebrate. I bought a tarte Tatin with apples since the French didn’t understand the concept of pumpkin pie, and sat alone in my room, sulking.

I missed everything, including Turkey Day football. Feel free to raise your eyes at the thought of poor little Christine toughing it out in the City of Light.

This time, I again found myself in a city that doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving, the most American of holidays.

The difference between the past and the present is striking. I still didn’t eating pumpkin pie and to be honest, I can’t stand that dessert so it’s no great loss.

My father is now gone, and he’s been joined by my mother, both grandmothers and many other family and dear friends. The voices I heard still speak foreign languages, and I once again missed classic football games.

The passage of time has taught me gratitude for what I have to balance out the regret for what I’ve lost, and an appreciation for the small cone of sand still left in suspension at the top of the hourglass.

I’m not old, but youth and middle age are in the rearview mirror of my terrestrial vehicle, and so I understand the need to prioritize. In that process, gratitude becomes essential in helping me discard the irrelevant and cling jealously to the essential.

My family, what remains of it, is essential.

They gathered at the table and consume turkey and all the accompanying artery-clogging sides, and chattered away about things that don’t matter.

But the chattering, the gathering together and even the momentary artery-clogging matter. Rituals matter. Being together matters. Looking up from the phones matter.

Prayers, even hurried-through-to-get-to-the-stuffing kind, matter.

And being an ocean away from them, hours ahead and out of sight made them matter to me more than any single thing in my life. That dwindling cone of sand, and all.

I’m grateful I was healthy enough to travel to my beloved Italy, unhampered by financial, or worse, physical obstacles.

To cross boundaries, alone, is a blessing.

It teaches me to appreciate my own good company and helps open me up to strangers who I’d otherwise never encounter.

For instance, I met a man, a restaurateur from Albania who remade his life in Florence after having been imprisoned in his native country under communist rule.

He spoke an Italian that Dante would have admired and told me I had the “look of a Modigliani” woman, which isn’t the compliment he seemed to think it was, but I’ll take it. Had I been with a traveling companion, that conversation would never have taken place.

I am now and always will be grateful for my boss, who is like family and taught me to love my Italian heritage.

His own family has enriched and enlarged the circle of those who make this temporal stage a thing of value. My female friends, sisters in a very real way, are small in number but fill a gaping hole with their presence in my life.

Another thing that fills me with gratitude is this column, and the ability to speak to strangers in a way that seems both intimate and ritualistic.

Every week, we get together, readers and writers, and have a two-way conversation about everything from abortion to football to massacres to memories. The list is endless.

And it is a two-way conversation, because I always hear back from you, either directly or indirectly from friends who say “Did you see that letter in the paper attacking you?”

It’s all part of the process, and it means we’re still engaged in the world. For that, I am deeply grateful because the alternative is an intellectual graveyard peppered with the headstones of the ignorant and the uninvolved.

I do hope that you had reason to give thanks, as I did. I hope that you always will.

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Copyright 2023 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

About six years ago, there was a little boy named Charlie Gard.

Charlie lived in England, and had two loving parents who begged the country’s National Health Service to provide experimental treatment for the boy, who suffered from a debilitating condition known as mitochondrial disease.

At every turn they were stymied because the nihilistic powers that be in the U.K. determined that his life was not worth the effort.

Then, the parents tried to have him moved to the U.S. where several hospitals offered to treat the 9-month-old child. And even there, comfort, hope and relief were denied. Court after court rejected their pleas, and little Charlie Gard was allowed to die while the world watched.

In the wake of the Ohio decision last week to actually codify a “right” to abortion in its constitution, I was reminded of this sad story, this earlier example of how sterile the world had become.

Kill them before they’re born or kill them when they are too sick to be valued, it’s just a different marker on the road to inhumanity.

And then it happened all over again.

There was another child, a little girl named Indi Gregory who also suffered from mitochondrial disease. Like Baby Charlie, Indi had the misfortune of being born in England, a country that seems to have completely eradicated the concept of parental rights.

Indi’s parents, like Charlie’s before them, had fought in the courts to keep their child on life support in order to allow her to travel outside of her native U.K. and seek other experimental treatments.

But the British courts sided time and time again with the doctors who exercised an almost God-like prerogative to put a value on this innocent life. The suggestion they actually cared about this child’s welfare is completely contradicted by their actions.

They essentially allowed Indi to starve to death.

Imagine what it takes to see a child that still has that sacred spark of life within her and say: “No, your time is over.”

When you focus on the issue of abortion, as I often do, it’s easy to get lost in the semantical weeds.

People who support abortion rights benefit from the invisibility of that unborn life. They are able to argue that fetuses aren’t babies, that unless “it” can survive outside of the womb a mother’s welfare takes precedence, and no one should sacrifice an actual human for a potential one.

Those arguments can be destroyed by ultrasounds and doctors like Ben Carson, who operate on children in utero, although it is increasingly difficult in a society that does not treasure the lives we cannot see, hear and touch.

But what is absolutely gruesome is the tendency to look at sickness, at handicaps, at diminished life expectancy and reduced “quality” of life as reasons to just let go.

Being pro-life doesn’t mean you try and save the lives that matter. It means saving every possible life that exists, whether within the womb or struggling to breathe on a ventilator.

The only bright spot in this most recent tragedy is the fact that my ancestral country, Italy, stepped up and tried to save Indi’s life.

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni convened a special session of Congress, which actually granted Indi Italian citizenship. They did this so the parents would be able to take Indi to the world famous Gesu Bambino children’s hospital in Rome, where they were willing to treat her condition.

Britain refused.

Like a jealous lover, it said that if it could not have the child, no one would. And Indi passed away.

The mere fact that the Italian politicians put their differences aside and actually came together to honor the humanity of this suffering little girl brings me to tears. They are tears of joy, albeit mixed with bitterness.

On the one hand, my people recognized that until the flame is fully extinguished, we have the right to fight on.

They understood that parents are entitled to do everything within their power to save their children.

They made me very proud of my heritage.

On the other hand, the creep of inhumanity continues, and it’s reaching our own shores.

My only hope is that Charlie was waiting for Indi at the gates of heaven with open arms.

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Copyright 2023 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

In the wake of the off-year elections across the country last week, it became very clear that abortion was the single most important issue that motivated voters.

More specifically, it motivated voters to choose Democrats. In case after case, when abortion was on the table, the pro-life movement lost.

In Ohio, a reliably red state that voted for Donald Trump and just elected a Trump-backed U.S. senator, voters passed a referendum that now enshrines abortion in the state constitution.

The amendment essentially legalizes abortion at every stage of the pregnancy, because of this last paragraph:

“However, abortion may be prohibited after fetal viability. But in no case may such an abortion be prohibited if in the professional judgment of the pregnant patient’s treating physician, it is necessary to protect the pregnant patient’s life or health.”

That is chilling. A viable child, one with the ability to live outside of the womb, can be destroyed in utero if it threatens the “health” of the mother.

What Ohio has done is resurrect language from the companion case to Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, which allowed abortions at any stage if the health of the mother was threatened.

That had been interpreted by lower courts as including the mental health of the mother.

The Ohio amendment will give Ohio women the right to abort their babies at any time up to and including the moment of birth because of that last paragraph. Doe is back, with a vengeance.

And there are many reasons why the mental health of a woman would be compromised by an unwanted abortion: a child diagnosed as having Down, a child that is going to be an economic burden, a child that is going to interrupt a career or further studies, and in some societies, a child who is the wrong gender.

These are not figments of my imagination. These are already legitimate reasons for women to obtain abortions in other countries and in some of our own 50 states.

So there is very little daylight here between humanity and inhumanity.

As chilling as that prospect is, something even more chilling occurred last week as the fallout from the Ohio referendum, and other election wins were analyzed: Republicans started retreating on their support for the unborn.

It’s no secret that progressive women are obsessed with having unlimited access to abortion, and have raised it to sacramental status in their secular lives. This was expected, and I was fully prepared to meet their cheers with jeers of my own.

What absolutely killed me, although I can’t feign much surprise, were the calls from conservatives to pull back on our opposition to abortion out of fear that we would never again win an election.

Megyn Kelly, whose podcast I devour on a daily basis and who I generally respect, was livid about the GOP losses and basically said on her show that we needed to stop talking about abortion.

In other words, we needed to tone down our support for the rights of unborn children. In even fewer words, we needed to shut up about human rights.

The asylum lawyer in me, the one who deals every day with the persecution of the innocent, recoils at that suggestion.

Apparently, I’m in the minority, because there are a lot of people out there who think they need to apologize for their pro-life views or even worse, hide them.

There was Nikki Haley at the debate, saying she would never judge a pro-choice woman. Why even have an opinion on the sanctity of life to begin with? She lost my vote, right there.

There were lamentations from establishment Republicans saying that abortion was a “personal choice” and that we needed to stop incorporating life issues into an official platform.

There were people of faith saying that they didn’t want to push their religion on other people.

It’s funny, but I never realized that the issue of when life begins was a religious one. Science dictates the creation of human life, not the Gospels.

I realize, now, that I am without a party.

If this trend continues, and I see more and more states celebrating the codification of a barbarity so obvious that the only way it can be stomached is if its supporters lie and cheat, I might have to simply give up on politics altogether, and focus my efforts on getting my own soul ready for judgment day.

It looks like my efforts here are falling on deaf ears, and stone cold hearts.

Or to put it another way, what does it profit a man to win Ohio, but lose his soul?

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Copyright 2023 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

Initially I said to myself, this is not my battle.

But then I watched, in horror, as people marched through the streets of Philadelphia chanting the genocidal slogan of the Palestinian people: “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free.”

Translation: Kill the Jews, push them into the river, keep faith with the ancestors and their desperate attempts at a final solution.

In fact, I heard the words “solution” used in exactly that context by young students of all races and religions as they filled Rittenhouse Square on a warm October evening.

My first instinct was to provide quiet support and let the Jewish residents of Philadelphia take the lead in the PR war. But then I started seeing the reports of what had been done in Gaza to innocent Israelis. I heard about the kidnapping of elderly grandmothers, the rape of younger women, the murder of babies.

I realized that we had entered a very dark period when, instead of crying out in horror that infants were massacred, supporters of Palestine were quibbling about whether the children had been decapitated, thrown in ovens or simply shot.

That was the hill the defenders of Hamas were willing to die upon.

We all have a role in this tragedy if we are human beings. The suggestion that this is not our battle to wage, and that we must be polite and judicious and respect the defenders of Hamas is as repellent to me as the thought that there is some value to Talibanic rule and the dehumanization of women in Afghanistan.

It is as inconceivable as the idea that mutilating the genitals of a young Muslim girl in West Africa should be respected as a “cultural tradition.”

It is as maddening as the argument I once heard from a judge at an asylum hearing that we in the United States cannot hold other countries to our standards of human and civil rights.

If we can’t do that, why even file for asylum in the first place?

And you know the thing that triggered me the most?

It wasn’t being called profane insults by the people marching down Chestnut Street and chanting their uneducated slogans about the holy martyrs of Hamas. It wasn’t Jake Tapper on CNN, carrying water for Rashida Tlaib and essentially defending her defense of terrorists just so he could make some cute little jab at Marjorie Taylor Greene.

It wasn’t even the refusal of college presidents to come out and unequivocally condemn the horrors in Israel without adding “But the Palestinian children…”

The thing that most angered me was a comment from an anonymous person who played the “I’m a Jew so shut up shiksa” card.

His comment was as follows:

“I am a Jew who does not need a homeland, that supports the resistance of Palestine, and am watching with my own eyes the textbook definition of genocide against Palestinian children.”

The fellow needs to read up on the definition of the word “genocide.”

According to the Oxford Languages Dictionary, it means “the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.”

What the Arab world is trying to do to Jews is genocidal, by that definition, but not what Israel is doing to protect itself.

Tragic, collateral damage of people living in an area as human shields to terrorists is not “genocide.”

Trust the shiksa, who has 30 years of asylum practice at her back.

It is incumbent upon non-Jews to speak out against the rising tide of anti-Semitism that we see in this country and in the world. It is not up to our Jewish brothers and sisters to take on the burden alone, even though they are quite capable of raising their powerful voices.

As the Jew and the Catholic marched with Protestant MLK, as my own white father marched with Blacks in Mississippi, every one of us who claims the dignity of being human needs to speak out against the terror.

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Copyright 2023 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

When I was a teenager, my father belonged to Philadelphia’s Union League.

Back then, in the late 1970s, women were excluded from the membership rolls. I also remember that the female guests who dined with their male friends were politely asked to use the entrance on Sansom Street. It was a delicate way of showing that they were welcome to visit, but not to stay.

Unfortunately, I’ve been to see signs recently that it’s women handing out membership cards to the Old Boys Club. Or at lleast helping the Old Boys score points.

That’s very clear after watching what Democrats have been trying to do to Judge Carolyn Tornetta Carluccio, Republican candidate for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

While I’m not certain that her opponent, Dan McCaffery is funding these attempts at character assassination, I have no doubt he welcomes the help. If he didn’t, he’d come out and say how dishonest they actually were.

There is a slew of new campaign ads tarring Carluccio as some nightmare out of the “Handmaids Tale,” willing to subject women across the commonwealth to forced pregnancies. It is the same sort of sensational half-truths that were used against Dr. Mehmet Oz in the last senatorial election, and which will be used against Dave McCormick in the next one.

But the attacks on her honor are particularly repellent, because they play on the old, tired trope that women only care about abortion rights, and the women who are even moderate on the life issues are a threat to women everywhere.

The Old Boys figured out how effective that could be when they listened to some Old Girls, and a perfect union was formed.

When I watch these ads, I think that the guys who want to keep a strong, accomplished female jurist from getting a seat on the highest court in the state are afraid of her. They can’t meet her head on, and so they use the subterfuge of caring about women’s rights, all the while trashing an actual woman who has displayed a great talent for protecting them.

For example, as a former federal prosecutor, Carluccio has been instrumental in getting weapons off the streets and drug dealers incarcerated. On the other hand, she has significant experience as a public defender, and understands the importance of protecting due process rights of the accused, some of whom also happen to be women.

Seems to me the judge understands that both sides of the legal scale have to be respected.

The attacks against the judge in those ridiculous ads are rooted in some progressive fantasy that all we care about as females is the ability to have virtually unlimited access to abortion.

When I spoke with Carluccio in preparation for this column, she lamented how ironic it was that in order to be elected you needed to be on a “team” but then when you were on the bench, your obligation was to rule without putting your finger on the scales based upon party registration.

It’s a difficult tightrope to navigate, and this woman has done it with amazing grace for the past 14 years.

Carluccio was first elected to the bench in 2009 and was recently voted president judge of the Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas. She is the first woman to have been elevated to that position, and she won the support of Democrats and Republicans.

That’s because she hasn’t allowed politics to supplant jurisprudence. The Democrats who voted for her must have agreed.

And that brings me to the unfortunate situation in Delaware County, where the Democratic Committee has engaged in a repellent power move and refused to recommend three well-qualified Republican judges for retention.

Their attempts to prove that this has nothing at all to do with politics is laughable, and qualifies many of those Democrats to moonlight as comedy writers for “Saturday Night Live.”

It is unfortunate that judges need to run for office. In a better world, merit would be self-evident, without the gamesmanship.

In that world, Carluccio would be welcomed by everyone who shares the values instilled in her by her parents, an Irish mother and an Italian father who she credits with teaching her that three things matter above all: family, faith and doing the right thing, even when it’s the hardest of the alternatives.

But we live in the world of those half-truths, and the Old Boys and their complicit Old Girls have to push the party line to retain their oligarchical authority.

It’s bad enough when the focus is on legislatures and executives. It is dangerous when it involves the judiciary.

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Copyright 2023 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

There is something in asylum law called the “material support to terrorist” bar, which essentially states that if you have given significant assistance to a terrorist organization, you cannot obtain refuge in the United States.

In virtually all cases, any kind of support of a financial or tactical nature to a militant of any stripe, even if you have a gun pointed at your head or at the head of your child, will deprive you of the right to asylum.It might seem draconian, but it is a recognition by our government that you give up your right to seek protection if you have assisted in the violation of someone else’s human rights.

I was thinking of that last week as I watched protesters filling the streets of cities like Philadelphia, Boston, New York and Washington.

It occurred to me the folks who were shouting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” were mouthing the usual Hamas propaganda, which seeks the annihilation of Israel. There was also a repellent protest on the campus at the University of Pennsylvania, where marchers accused Israel of genocide, and said that the massacre in Gaza was justified.

And while many of the protesters and their media supporters tried to draw a distinction between the Palestinian people and the terrorists who they elected into office in 2007, there is no question that for some, they were interchangeable.

In the days after the horrific attacks by Hamas on innocent Israelis, and in some cases only hours after children had been murdered in their cribs, student groups at schools like Harvard, Columbia, Ohio State, Swarthmore and LaSalle issued those statements, which contained language that sounded as if it had been taken from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

There was blame for Israel, and beyond that, palpable Jew hatred. I have started to use that phrase instead of the more sanitized “anti-Semitism” because Semites cover a larger ethnicity, which also includes Arabs, whereas the hostility toward Israel is limited to hostility toward its Jewish population.

And important people noticed.

CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, alumni of these august institutions, started informing their alma maters that they were “closing the checkbooks,” as Penn alum and former presidential candidate Jon Huntsman put it.

The most crippling consequence of these anti-Israel statements will likely fall on the students who signed those statements. And that is exactly as it should be, despite the shock of those students and the protests from even some so-called conservative “civil libertarians.”

Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman has called on his alma mater Harvard to release the names of all of the students who signed a letter that included the language “[Israel’s] apartheid regime is the only one to blame” for the Oct. 7 massacre in Gaza.

He wants possible employers who would normally be attracted by a Harvard pedigree to know that a job candidate blamed Israel for the death of its own citizens.

Similarly, several high profile, white shoe law firms have rescinded job offers to students who made clear that they supported Hamas’ actions in Gaza.

When Ryna Workman, student bar association leader at New York University, blamed Israel alone for the carnage in the bar association newsletter, Winston and Strawn cancelled its job offer, noting that her comments “profoundly conflict with [our] values.”

I normally oppose cancellation in any form, but I celebrate these actions as a fair and justified exercise of free-market principles. You can have your opinions, and you can express them from the mountaintops, but just be ready to bear the consequences.

Even though no one should prevent these students from sharing their views about the conflict in the Middle East, we have the right, and the obligation, to tell them what we think of those opinions.

And it goes even further than that. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote that “In the end, we will not remember the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends.”

So many of these elite academic institutions and organizations remained silent in the face of the horrific attacks on innocent Israelis.

Sometimes you have to pick a side, and refusing to do so renders you a moral cipher.

So I celebrate the righteous smackdown of those who support terror attacks on innocent men, women and children. I’m certain they’ll eventually find gainful employment as spineless college administrators.

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Copyright 2023 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

One of the very first pieces of verse that I ever memorized was this, from Pastor Martin Neimoller:

“First they came for the Communists / and I did not speak out / because I was not a Communist.

“Then they came for the Socialists / and I did not speak out / because I was not a Socialist.

“Then they came for the trade unionists / and I did not speak out / because I was not a trade unionist.

“Then they came for the Jews / and I did not speak out / because I was not a Jew.

“Then they came for me / and there was no one left to speak out for me.”

I think of these words often, because I deal with oppression and human rights violations on a daily basis. My work, cherished as it is, brings me face-to-face with the ugliest parts of humanity.

I have clients who have been raped, kidnapped, tortured, barred from their churches, stripped of their livelihoods, threatened with death, and almost killed.

And in each of these cases, there is that one single truth at play: had there been someone who stepped up and said something to defend or protect them, they might not have been refugees.

We need to speak out when we see injustice. We need to speak out clearly, unequivocally, and without the kind of whataboutism that often infects our conversations.

We need to stare down evil, use the right words, and condemn it. And that is why we need to condemn Hamas and all of those who support it and voted for it.

It is actually quite easy to condemn a terror group. When you see someone invade a territory without provocation, kidnap and then decapitate babies, rape their mothers, put bullets through the heads of elderly bus riders and disappear hundreds of young, innocent Israeli concertgoers, you do not have the luxury of nuance.

There is no gray area. These people, these savages, have emerged from the gates of a terrestrial Hell.

Do not make the mistake of calling them animals, as my friend Paul reminded me the other day. Animals do not have a sense of right and wrong, of moral and profane, of virtue and vice.

Animals are reactive, not proactive, and they do not have feelings. Animals kill to survive, not to punish.

Palestinian terrorists are not animals. For all of their animalistic tendencies, they still have the agency that God gives to all of his creation, what we Catholics call “free will.”

They understand the consequences of their actions, and that makes those actions even more repellent than their inherent nature because those consequences are not inevitable.

Palestinian terrorists want to destroy, and that is what they have been doing for decades.

As a child, I remember Black September, the group that kidnapped and murdered Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. In 1972 I was only 10 years old, and yet I understood that evil had been unleashed on the world.

Those Olympics were a continent away, and yet I remember feeling unsafe in my sweet little home in Delco.

That is what the presence of evil does, it transcends time and space, air and ocean to reach us.

The evil perpetrated by Hamas this week is that same evil, only magnified. While the murder of innocent adult athletes was a horror that forever changed the political landscape, the more recent acts of barbarism against Jews in Gaza seem to dwarf it.

That is because the murdered now include teenagers at a concert, elderly couples, and the most diabolical of all acts, the decapitation and murder of babies.

Nothing justifies it, and people like AOC and Rashida Tlaib and some of the most vile Philadelphians who populate our streets are beneath contempt for even making the
attempt.

In defending Palestine, and the people who made Hamas possible, they are defending infanticide. And they do it with defiance, and ghoulish smiles and raised fists of solidarity.

These are bad people. These are truly evil, in their own right.

And unless we stand up and condemn them as well as the actual perpetrators of these crimes, we become like the person who remained silent as the Communists, the Socialists, the trade unionists and the Jews … the Jews … were destroyed.

And by not speaking out in black-and-white terms, demanding justice only for the Israelis whose blood was shed by those who shed their own humanity, we will be next.

They will not come for us with knives, and guns and screams. They will have already annihilated our very souls, and that is the most precious possession of all.

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Copyright 2023 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

When I learned that Josh Kruger had been murdered in Philadelphia last week week, I felt the same sense of shock that most people experienced at hearing the news.

The media community in the Delaware Valley is fairly insular, even though we happen to be in a rather large market, and most of those who write either know personally, or have had some kind of interaction with, others who write.

Josh — I presume to use his first name even though we never actually met — was someone whose politics and personal affinities were diametrically opposed to my own.

We mixed it up sometimes on social media, usually with me criticizing something he’d written because I couldn’t believe he’d actually written it.

The most recent encounter involved Wawa: Josh had written an opinion piece attacking the convenience chain for “abandoning” Philadelphia, as if they had some obligation to continue subjecting their employees to shoplifters, drug addicts, aggression and homeless people.

Josh would have called them “unhoused people.”

He also would have rejected the term “drug addict,” possibly shaming me into submission by mentioning that he himself had once suffered from substance abuse.

In other words, we had no common words.

On Monday morning, when I heard that he had been shot to death in a home invasion, I could no longer feign ignorance. This was tragic, unbelievable, real life. I initially hesitated to say anything, because of my past criticisms. It didn’t seem appropriate.

But then I started seeing things in social media that made me sick to my stomach, and I realized that sometimes, silence is assent.

If I remained silent and didn’t point out what was happening among some of the people with whom I do share politics and personal affinities, I would be guilty of the same things they were doing.

And for all that I was not a friend to Josh in life, I owe him this in death.

Josh Kruger was a huge booster for the city of Philadelphia, as I am, but he was almost willfully blind to the gun crisis unfolding.

One of his very last public posts was a retweet of a tweet by former Dilbert illustrator Scott Adams who suggested to Josh that if Joe Biden were elected in 2020, he would be killed.

He called Adams, tongue in cheek, “Nostradamus.”

That night, he was shot to death.

Not one to let a tragedy go to waste, and in repellent bad taste, Adams actually posted this when he heard about the murder:

“Oops. Did not realize he was shot to death yesterday for not getting away from the hellhole in which he lived.”

This was tame, compared to some of the other things I saw posted on Josh’s timeline.

It’s amazing the cockroaches that crawl out of the woodwork when there is no possibility that you will get pushback.

The cowardice and the lack of taste are not unexpected. But they really are soul crushing when you realize that some of these people normally “like” your stuff and write emails to tell you what a great writer you are.

There is a line over which we do not step when someone dies in a tragic manner.

We do not blame them for their own death at the hands of a criminal, even if that victim supported policies that made his death more likely.

But here’s the thing. The little that we now know about the murder suggests that it was not a random shooting, another home invasion involving robbery or unrelated criminal acts.

It seems likely that the victim knew his murderer, and that it might have had something to do with a domestic matter.

In fact, in the days before his death, Josh had posted about vandalism at his home, and receiving strange mail.

This would not appear to be the kind of violence that he and I disagreed about, the nameless, nihilistic thuggery that occurs every day in the streets of Philadelphia and beyond.

That’s even more reason for the people on the right to just shut up with their snark and their schadenfreude.

And it is mostly people on the right, who somehow saw this death as an opportunity to make political points.

This includes national figures like Mike Cernovick, a right wing pundit who had the gall to say that people who were mocking his lisp had somehow, mysteriously died, as if this justified Josh Kruger’s shooting death because he had discredited the rising tide of gun deaths.

Death requires, if not sympathy, at the very least, sobriety.

As our grandmothers said, if you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

Word to my tribe: You lose members when you show your inhumanity.

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Copyright 2023 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].

John F. Kennedy’s book “Profiles in Courage” told the story of a rare, few U.S. senators who went against the tide of popular opinion and committed acts that ultimately led to severe criticism and in some cases, political defeat.

The names are at best vaguely remembered and in some cases lost to history, but the idea of defying societal standards in service of a higher purpose i.e. “doing the right thing” as Spike Lee might say, is fundamental.

I thought of the book this week when Judge Wendy L. Pew dismissed all charges against Philadelphia Police Officer Mark Dial.

Dial had been charged with murder and other lesser offenses by Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, a man who has weaponized his office against the police department as a means of advancing his “social justice” philosophy.

Krasner’s focus is on dismantling the supposedly racist criminal justice system, emptying jails, and providing “restorative justice” to those who have been harmed by the bigotry of people who think felons belong in prison. It’s a philosophy common among a new breed of prosecutors who are really just lesser-paid criminal defense attorneys in disguise.

This past Tuesday, Pew dismissed the charges against Dial because she found they had no evidentiary basis. People, with no legal training but with a lot of social media savvy, have argued that the judge overlooked video evidence, eyewitness testimony and departed from accepted standards when dismissing the charges, which were immediately lodged again by Krasner.

In the Twittersphere, activists started aiming for the judge, leveling thinly veiled threats about taking her seat from her in the upcoming election. And there were some more ominous threats as well.

On the evening of the dismissal, riots erupted in the streets of Philadelphia. I was caught up in one of them near 15th and Chestnut streets in Center City, where a group of unhinged vandals and what I like to call “Flat Screen And Sneaker Activists” plundered local stores, carrying their booty in their arms like refugees fleeing some sort of civil war.

Only they were the ones causing the mayhem and the conflict.

Judge Pew isn’t as fortunate. She works in a courtroom, protected by layers of security, but her name has been out there and unwisely cited by a number of local publications that, while entitled to distribute the news, could have done so in a more measured way.

Then we had local journalists whom I will not name but with whom I used to work tweeting out videos about how horrific it was that Dial was allowed to walk, and writing that they were “beyond outrage.”

I understand being “beyond outrage.” I was beyond outrage when I was forced to navigate through a mob of vandals, and a phalanx of police officers to get to my home on Tuesday night.

I was beyond outraged that the legitimate dismissal of charges triggered a night of riots and looting.

I was beyond outraged that the actions of a judge, after due deliberation and with a deep understanding of the rights of defendants, have been attacked as just another example of racism.

Ironically, the day that the charges were dismissed against Dial, I was watching a docuseries from my friend Tigre Hill on Paramount+ called “72 Seconds in Rittenhouse,” which recounts the murder of Sean Schellenger at the hands of Michael White.

When Schellenger, a real estate agent was stabbed in the back by White, a food service deliveryman, the case became a Rohrshack test on race, class and due process.

I am quoted in the series praising Frank Rizzo, whose idea of policing is now considered antiquated in this “kinder to the criminal, gentler on the crime” era.

While many people would disagree with my assessment of the former police commissioner/mayor, I think that the sharp swing to the other extreme represented by Larry Krasner and the progressive prosecutors is profoundly damaging to society.

That is why what Pew did is both remarkable and courageous.

She clearly understood the tenor of the city, and the desire for a pound of flesh from a police officer.

It’s no secret that Krasner has been waging war on police for the past six years, ever since he was first elected to office. She also clearly understood where many progressive Philadelphians stand on criminal justice reform.

And yet she honored our shared profession by not allowing emotions or security concerns to blind her to the reality: Krasner had overcharged Dial, and his evidence didn’t add up.

She had two choices: ignore that and go forward with the case or terminate the legal farce.

Her actions were a profile in courage, and since she is barred from speaking out about her actions, I will do it for her: well done, your honor.

Thank you for refusing to be intimidated by social narratives, and for following the law.

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Copyright 2023 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].