Thanks to a tip-off from a reader, I have learned that the interviewer in the English Defence League leadership videos posted by Paul Ray (and blogged by me here) is Martin Mawyer of the Christian Action Network, a Christian Right outfit based in Virginia. According to his bio blurb:
Christian Action Network (CAN) was founded in 1990 by Martin Mawyer. He based the organization on biblical principles, values, traditions and truths…An activist in the religious community for over two decades, Mr. Mawyer began as a free-lance journalist for various Christian publications and then served as editor of Jerry Falwell’s “Moral Majority Report.”
…Since its inception in 1989, the Christian Action Network has strongly supported the right to life for the unborn; voluntary prayer in public schools and restoring religious liberties; has lobbied in favor of legislation that would defend traditional marriage; has worked to expose “Gay Days at Walt Disney World” to protect children and families; and has advocated an end to taxpayer-funded “hate art” through the National Endowment for the Arts.
…Among Mr. Mawyer’s numerous radio and television appearances are CNN’s Larry King Live, Sonya Live and Talk Back Live, NBC’s Today Show, Entertainment Tonight, C-SPAN’s Viewer Call-In, FOX’s Morning News, Hannity & Colmes and The O’Reilly Factor, Pat Robertson’s 700 Club, Jerry Falwell’s Pastor’s Study, Dr. D. James Kennedy’s Coral Ridge Ministries.
Mawyer claims that there is a network of jihadi terror-training camps across the USA, where plans are underway to launch attacks using weapons of mass destruction; however, an interview he gave on the subject to Sean Hannity on Fox a few months ago was somewhat underwhelming:
Mawyer: They have weapons of mass destruction…
Hannity: What kind of weapons of mass destruction?
Mawyer: Well, in some cases I can’t uh, even tell you, Sean.
As indicated from the bio, before his move onto the “anti-jihadi” bandwagon, Mawyer was known for other typical Christian Right issues, in particular anti-gay activism. As a good Christian, in 2000 he considered it important to spread the rumour that Hilary Clinton is a lesbian; Church and State reported that:
The Christian Action Network (CAN), a Religious Right group based in Forest, Va., held a press conference in New York City Sept. 7 to announce plans to place ads in the New York media suggesting that Clinton is gay. The organization freely admitted that it had no hard evidence for the allegation but cited ongoing “rumors.”
…CAN’s fund-raising letters encourage hatred of homosexuals, make outrageous claims about public education and other targets and float improbable scenarios about a possible United Nations takeover of America.
…A March 2000 letter written by Mawyer’s wife, Bonnie, blasted Disney for allowing gay groups to visit Disney World. The letter asserts, “Now I have learned that the radical, perverted homosexuals and lesbians are already promoting their ‘2000 Disney Gay Day’ – with Disney’s help! And they are timing it to occur in June – right when children out of school will be flocking to Disneyowned parks! This proves the true intent of these homosexuals: they are after our children!!”
The Southern Poverty Law Center has further details:
In his “dirty and dangerous” battle against “militant homosexual groups,” Mawyer has not held back. In 1997, after Ellen Degeneres came out as a lesbian on her TV sitcom, Mawyer accused her of “DUMPING HER FILTHY LESBIAN LIFESTYLE RIGHT IN THE CENTER OF YOUR LIVING ROOM!! … If we allow the tidal wave of gay and lesbian smut to continue to pour into our homes, it will utterly consume us in no time at all!”
…A 2000 Mawyer mailing incorporated militia-like paranoia: “I am not ready to give this great nation over to one-world government extremists … radical, disease-carrying homosexuals … anti-family lesbian feminists … or anti-American U.N. globalists!”
CAN activists today are familiar faces at Gay Days, videotaping “bad behavior.” In 2003, CAN turned its footage of “homosexual kissing, hugging and fondling” into a video tour of the Southeast, warning parents about the perils of Gay Days and warning that “homosexuals live in a pattern of sin and debauchery.”
The Christian Action Network was apparently in the UK as part of a tour with none other than Robert Spencer. In an August posting on Jihad Watch, Spencer tells us that:
I had a most illuminating dinner with a group including Douglas Murray that offered a bracing introduction to British dhimmitude: we had to move our dinner at the last minute since the proprietors of the George Restaurant didn’t like us discussing jihad and Islamization on the premises…When not getting bounced out of pubs, the intrepid Jason Campbell of the Christian Action Network and I took strolls into a few mosques…
However, a commentator at the posting adds the detail that “Tensions between some of the anti-jihadist factions who had all been kindly invited by Jason to a meal caused splitting of the groups and confusion.”
So, who comes off worse? The English Defence League hanging out with a man known primarily for his alarmist hatemongering against gays and lesbians? Or the head of the Christian Action Network hanging out with some anonymous men in paramilitary-style balaclavas from an organisation which has described itself as “the most ruthless street army in the country”, and which has not quite succeeded in showing it has no truck with the far-right?
UPDATE: Douglas Murray’s Centre for Social Cohesion has sent me a message asking me to publicise the following:
CAN asked Douglas to do an interview with them – upon seeing the presence of the EDL at the CAN discussion he refused to deal with them and left the venue. He did however give an interview to CAN at another location on the water front. He didn’t actually know who the CAN were, and always says yes to interviews, hence his appearances on other dubious channels such as the Islam Channel.
He also did have dinner only with Spencer in a personal capacity later that evening.
Filed under: Uncategorized
I read this blog entry as an exercise in not getting indignant. It was a severe test. As old Freddie Nittski says in Beyond Good and Evil, indignation is wasted mental energy. Thank you for keeping on this stuff, Richard.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has further details:
The SPLC is discredited. When one checks out their ‘hate’ map, one finds mention of ‘fundamentalist’ Catholic groups(!!??), but nothing on the jihadists.
For N. Carolina (only two months ago) they had multiuple listings for the Far Right ( and so they should!), but nothing at all on jihadist groups that operate in the state. A few weeks later Daniel Patrick Boyd and entourage were arrested for planing acts of mass murder on American soil.
The SPLC, as with most other Far Left outfits, lives in the past and is thoroughly unable to readjust its aim to meet the challenges of newer and far more dangerous individuals and groups.
And as for fundamentalist Christians being a threat to gays? As a gay, I used to worry about that, but now realise there are much bigger fish to fry.
The SPLC ( and other such advocacy groups) are ideologically driven and operate under soft-racist asumptions concerning non-western peoples, cultures and religions, assumptions that give these same peoples cultures and religions a pass on their bigotry, hatred and homophobia. They are no longer equipped to deal with emerging threats, prefering instead to keep their focus on movements, ideologies and individuals, that though ‘comfortable’, are in steep decline and present little danger.
That ideological blindness has allowed many of the worst anti-semites and homophobes to fly in under the radar and to set up shop unobserved and undetected.
The SPLC, consequently, far from enhancing our perssonal safety, is actually eroding our security and leaving us vulnerable to groups and individuals who won’t hesitate a second when it comes to committing murder.
And therefore Martin Mawyer must be a jolly nice chap who doesn’t really hate gays or have weird obsessions about globalists.
Exactly.
I don’t know where you got that claim out of what June wrote. Very dishonest of you.
I hit the wrong reply button for my first “exactly”. I don’t agree with your total mischaracterization of June’s comment.
Exactly
Good grief, it was a sacrastic response to her “whataboutery” tactic/
And therefore Martin Mawyer must be a jolly nice chap who doesn’t really hate gays or have weird obsessions about globalists.
No, Martin Mawyer is a homophobe, but in a very paleo sort of way that presents very little danger to gays.
Look, I was overjoyed when the SPLC was founded back in ’71 and figured it’d provide a good deal of protection to vulneral groups against Far Right predations, and indeed it DID.
The nature of ‘Far right’, however, has undergone a dramatic transformation over the past 20-odd years, and the SPLC, due to its ideological blinkers, seems joyously oblivious to that change.
They cannot even make a distinction between groups like Opus Dei (fundies but hardly murderous), and others whose religion-ideology would see to it that gays were murdered outright.
How many people must be killed before the SPLC’s learning curve speeds up? Most of the work they now do and the press statements they release are largely pointless… akin to selling beachwear in January.
Geez, there are probably more nazis in just one old episode of Hogan’s Heroes than there is in the entire States.
Spend some time in the American South, and you will realize that there is a lot of hostility towards homosexuals there. I know because I spent quite a bit of time there to attest to it. You may deny it all you want because it doesn’t fit your anti-Muslim worldview, but facts are facts.
“Geez, there are probably more nazis in just one old episode of Hogan’s Heroes than there is in the entire States.”
Not a very good analogy. Fascism, and fascist sympathies in the USA have a long and well documented history.
http://www.nsm88.org/
June, good posts.
Anakist gives us a link to demonstrate the dangerous viability of the Nazis in America. It’s a blog of the “National Socialist [i.e., Nazi] Movement”.
Under one of the sociopolitical events of theirs that they report, titled ” We had our Annual NSM bbq at a local park here in the Metro Detroit area” — there is an accompanying pic of the members at that event:
http://www.nsm88.org/images/mibbq2009.jpg
Wow, looks like a scary mass movement there! :)
We had our Annual NSM bbq at a local park here in the Metro Detroit area” — there is an accompanying pic of the members at that event: Yeah, I know! Pople have lost the ability to distinguish between a few rag-tag losers and the real fascists.
Just an observation…I noticed in videos of these events that the anti-fascists all appear to be South Asian, whereas in the past most of this crowd would have been white with a few members of the ethnic community being defended also in attendance.
I doubt these South Asians would even march in unison with white anti-fascists because their chauvinistic, manichean world-view isn’t based on skin-colour differences, but rather revolves around something else altogether; criteria that real anti-fascists have yet to fess up to, confront and denounce.
Yes, Mr. Bartholomew, Martin Mawyer and all those other right-wingers have been indoctrinating, training, and sending out wave upon wave of suicide bombers, executing apostates who’ve renounced Christianity, “honor”-murdering one thousand women a year (as in Pakistan as far as can be documented), enforcing arranged marriages of their female co-believers as young as age ten, instituting Christian legacy laws requiring the inheritances of men be twice those of women, levelling democracies’ trade center structures and government buildings and buses and subways with kamikaze airliners and suicide bombers’ flindered flesh and bones, lobbing mortar bombs and launching tens of thousands of rockets into Israel, stoning adulteresses, hurling gays from cliffs, driving Moslems from Iraq and burning their mosques, slicing clitorises from their pubescent female young, leaving Egypt’s Copts alone while they fire mosques and rape Moslem women, dynamiting ancient colossal Buddhist statuary, mass-force-converting tens of thousands to their pitiless Christian creed, turning whole urban districts into Christian-dominated no-go zones wherein Christians routinely thrash their wives and bash gays with impunity, expropriating and destroying the Korans brought into democracies by peaceful Moslems, and circulating videos of their beheadings of journalists.
Surely in this day and age of Moslem quiescence and non-violence, Mawyer and his ilk are the force to be reckoned with! Could you, Mr. Bartholomew, please continue to not mention the elephant in the room? There, now, that’s a good dhimmi.
Shouldn’t you go join Blackwater and pimp a few Iraqi girls in your quest for the crusade, as the former CEO of the company recently admitted to? It would be right up your ally to pump bullets into the bodies of Iraqi children, as your lot tend to fantasize about.
Another instance of how the hell did you get that out of the comment. It’s as if a person had written a comment decrying the crimes of southern slaveholders, and you pop in and accuse them of wanting to pump bullets into the bodies of white Georgian children.
@ Jordynne Olivia Lobo. That’s quite a good comment, but even with such obvious elephants, les bien pensants won’t see the pachyderm. That said, some of the less bien pensant are starting to, thank god!
Great reporting Richard. Watching the videos it was an obvious question who was the bloke interviewing them.
Jordynne Olivia Lobo two can play that game. The fact is that single biggest purveyor of violence and bloodshed around the world since ww2 has been the US government. US lead wars sanctions coups etc have killed millions. Here is a quick list Vietnam approx 3 million sanctions against Iraq I million,
the 2 gulf wars another million its along list and I could go on for ages. That total grows daily just a few days ago they murdered another 94 afghans. Us christian fundementalists are the most dangerous religious extremists in the world because they have influence in the most heavily militarised and militaristic and aggresive nation on earth. People like William G. Boykin think they are doing gods work when they incinerate Iraqis Afghans etc though I am sure that warms the cockles of the likes of June for whom I suspect the only good muslim is a dead muslim.
Tell you what, “lad.” When you’ve learned to spell and to use proper grammar, and when you don’t hide your identity behind an acronym, then you come back with your witless, insensible parroted comments and I’ll respond to them. But for now I’ll merely point out one fact, from among many like it, which you’ve overlooked: Mao’s deliberate infliction of famine on the Chinese, famine which starved to death up to 30 million of Mao’s own cherished proletariat – so since the Second World War it’s not the US but Red China which has proved itself to be, by far, the “single biggest purveyor” of mass murder. Now I’ll let you go swallow and recite some more Blame America First left-wing loopy propaganda. Good luck with your recitations, “lad,” because some of us still can and still do think for ourselves, so we’ve nothing to fear from the likes of your bogus regurgitated litany.
Jordynne Olivia Lobo
You obviously can`t read I said the US government is biggest purveyor of violence and bloodshed around the world. Whatever Mao did those crimes were committed in china by the chinese govenment. “Blame America First” is such pathetic stupid phrase used by apologists of crimes committed by the Us government. The Us government dropped millions of bombs on peasants thousands of miles away in a different continent. Mao is dead but the us government continues to slaughter people in Iraq Afghanistan Somalia etc though I suspect to people like William G. Boykin and your good self they are just a bunch of sand niggers, towel heads, ragheads etc anyway . Why is my litany bogus did not the Us attack Vietnam Iraq Somalia, even tiny Grenada. Of course its very boring to you. After they all a bunch of dead people right. Just untermenschen. Hey I must one of the blame America first crowd. The hypocritical christian fundies in the US who care so much about protecting the unborn child and are so opposed to abortion are pretty keen on waging aggresive wars abroad. In a recent opinion poll in the Us people who described themselves as conservative christians were more LIKELY to support torture then people who were secular. That tells me there is something deeply rotten in US christianity. Oh by the way when the US was slaughtering the Vietnamese they used to call them gooks. Always dehumanise the enemy first because it makes you feel better about killing them!!
“lad,” I disengage from a battle of wits with you because you have come to it pathetically unarmed.
Either that or you’re too much of a coward to address his points so you resort to ad-hominem attacks. Typical of your kind.
“lad,” I disengage from a battle of wits with you because you have come to it pathetically unarmed.
When reading ‘lad’s’ comments it’s hard to believe they aren’t computer generated.
I remember back in the 70s when Iranian leftists, both in america and Iran, sided with the Mullahs and denounced America. Their idiocy handed the Mullahs victory on a silver platter. But no sooner were they victorious than they began to systematically slaughter the same leftists that only a year earlier had given invaluable support to the ’cause’.
‘Lad’ appears to be just such a leftist.
As P.T. Barnum used to say: “There is a sucker born every minute”.
Although in the interests of integrity, he may have stolen it from Mohammed
June, you obviously are too stupid to comprehend the fact that it was the bloody US government along with the British that overthrew Iran’s secular democratic government and replaced it with a puppet just so you can have cheap petrol. If it wasn’t for that, Iran would still be a secular democracy to this day.
And didn’t the U.S. support another mullah in Pakistan during the 80’s? After all, it was the U.S. government that funneled billions of dollars to the Afghan mujahideen and turned a blind eye to Gen. Zia ul-Haq’s Islamicization efforts in Pakistan during then. I love how you clowns always bitch and whinge about the Iranian Revolution, yet ignore the role the West played in fostering Sunni extremism in Pakistan as long as the Soviets were kept at bay.
Who are you trying to kid you Evangelical nutbag?
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