Bartholomew's Notes

From CNN:

Aboard the USS Yorktown Tuesday morning, South Carolina State Senator Larry Grooms made his political defection official by announcing his endorsement of Rick Santorum.

…Although Grooms introduced Santorum to the crowd of reporters gathered for the press conference, he quietly joined the former senator on stage at the town hall that followed, leaving the introduction duties to retired General Jerry Boykin. 

A picture here shows Santorum

aboard the USS Yorktown, Tuesday in Mount Pleasant. Santorum’s national security advisor, Bill Connor, Lt. Gen. William Boykin and S.C. State Sen. Larry Grooms look on.

Boykin is well-known for his anti-Islam views (in 2010 he led an event in Texas alongside Walid Shoebat and Robert Spencer), and for his claim that economic difficulties in the USA are a conspiracy enacted by George Soros so that Obama can use healthcare legislation to create “an army of brownshirts”. Boykin is closely associated with the neo-Pentecostal evangelist Rick Joyner, and with Joyner’s MorningStar Ministries and Oak Initiative.

Boykin and Joyner are also involved in a chivalric group, called the Order of Saint John (or “The Knights of Malta: The Ecumenical Order”); Joyner is “Deputy Member of the Supreme Council”, while Boykin is the “Grand Chancellor”. Back in October, Boykin was present at a ceremony in Rhodes in which Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff was inducted into the Order by the “Grand Master”, Nicholas Papanicolaou. In September 2010, Boykin and Papanicolaou published a letter on behalf of the order which attacked Obama for employing Muslims in security roles:

The Obama Administration’s Department of Homeland Security recently swore in two devout Muslims in senior posts…. Was it not “Devout Muslim men” that flew planes into U.S. buildings 9 years ago? Was it not a Devout Muslim who killed 14 at Fort Hood?

Boykin formerly supported Rick Perry for President; in August he related how Perry had spoken privately with a group of evangelical leaders:

He said, “I’m doing this because I know this is what the Bible calls me [to do?]: ‘If my people who are called by my name will humble themselves in prayer'”, and that’s what the Bible says. And Rick Perry very humbly stood before a group of us and said, “I’m doing this because it’s what God wants us to do. It’s not a political ploy.”

Meanwhile, a number of other Christian Right big hitters are supporting Newt Gingrich.

UPDATE: I see that Boykin is following the lead of conservative thriller author Brad Thor, who introduced Santorum in Sioux City, Iowa. The Washington Post reported at the beginning of the year:

“How many people cry when they’re introducing someone?” Brad Thor, the popular thriller-author-turned-conservative-commentator, asked a crowd of more than 200 after his voice cracked while introducing Santorum at the Daily Grind coffee shop here. He joked that he’d done damage to his “tough-guy, conservative author cred,” then cracked: “I’m just glad this isn’t on national television.”

In mid-2010, Thor described this blog as representing “the utter nihilism of the left” after I expressed some qualified scepticism over his “Mullah Omar captured” story.

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From a  press release:

The human rights organizations Stop Islamization of America (SIOA) and Stop Islamisation of Europe (SIOE) are joining together to create a new global force determined to defend free societies globally: Stop Islamization of Nations (SION).

At the helm of SION as its founding President is the internationally renowned human rights activist and Executive Director of SIOA, Pamela Geller… Vice President is the acclaimed bestselling author and Islam expert, Robert Spencer.

The confirmed list of Board of Advisors for SION currently includes Dr. Ali Sina, the renowned ex-Muslim author and founder of FaithFreedom.org; Dr. Wafa Sultan, the ex-Muslim human rights activist and author; the German pro-freedom activist Stefan Herre of Politically Incorrect; the Israeli author Dr. Mordechai Kedar; the Hindu human rights activist Babu Suseelan; and Anders Gravers of Stop Islamisation of Europe (SIOE). More prominent pro-freedom activists will be added to the Board shortly.

This is not the first time that Geller has announced a new umbrella organization for the various “Stop Islamization” groups: back in November 2010 she announced a “Global Freedom Initiative”* along much the same lines, promising

a huge conference in DC early next year, and will follow up with our teams in Europe, Asia, Latin America, China, and the Middle East in the Spring.

That never amounted to much, and a “transatlantic summit” was cancelled in July. This time, however, we’re assured that

A worldwide summit of SION freedom activists is currently being organized; location, date and other details will be announced in the coming weeks

In the meantime, SION apparently has a piece of paper containing a list of names:

…Immediate SION actions will include publicizing the names of politicians, academics, journalists, artists and their networks that promote the Islamization of Western policy and culture.

The press release also tries to grab journalistic attention with a stunt announcement:

…SION also offers diversity and sensitivity training to corporations and government agencies at the local, state and national levels. This diversity training is designed to help these entities understand the jihad threat in all its different manifestations, including Islamic supremacist cultural initiatives to assert Islamic law and practice in the American workplace. It helps them protect their business practices in the face of demands for special accommodation for Muslim employees.

Geller’s “Board of Advisors” consist of the usual characters: Ali Sina “exposes Islam as a totalitarian political movement in the guise of religion and a threat to human civilization”, while Wafa Sultan is the author of A God Who Hates: The Courageous Woman Who Inflamed the Muslim World Speaks Out Against the Evils of Radical Islam. I blogged on Stefan Herre here – he is a former sports teacher, and there was controversy in 2008 when his website took advertising from the Jewish Task Force (as reported in Der Speigel here). Kedar is an academic collaborator with Geller’s lawyer David Yerushalmi; I blogged on their “Sharia and Violence in American Mosques” article here.

Babu Suseelan, meanwhile, spoke at Geller’s 2010 anti-New York mosque protest, where he warned that “the purpose of the construction of an Islamic barracks in the heart of America is to train jihadis, perhaps violent as well as non-violent, for the next phase of the Islamic invasion of America.”

However, Muslims are the the top of a very long list in Suseelan’s mind; in a typically overheated rant elsewhere, he rails against

Radical Muslims, conversion mafia, missionary misfits, Marxist criminals, bogus secular leaders and the corrupt congress party…  Anarchists, Maoists, Naxals, vagabonds, miscreants, counterfeiters, and subversive groups… 

Suseelan explains that Christian missionaries “are devising various modern deceptive plans to convert unsuspecting and ignorant Hindus”, and he is critical of Christianity in principle:

Islam and Christianity are religions of the book with a specific God, messenger, strict rules, prescription to follow, organizational hierarchy and dogmatic belief system. These are closed, dogmatic and fundamentalist and closed belief systems, which divide people between believers and non-believers.

…Hindus need to counter the growing trend among pseudo secularists and phony liberals to promote the false ideology “all religions are the same”. What we need is an informed mind to rationally conclude that religions of the books and Hindu Dharma are not complementary.

There are also “Hindu traitors” to worry about:

The nature of present destructive behavior of Hindu traitors, anti Hindu stance of pseudo secular and corrupt Hindu political leaders may resemble the past. Looking at more and more evidence of policies and programs against our eternal, sacred Vedic Dharma helps us to adequately explain the uniformity of destructive political behavior of Hindu traitors.

…In contemporary politics, most of our pseudo secular Congress party and regional political party leaders are subservient to Christians, Muslims and their political actions retard Hindu advancement. Hindus in general are servile or otherwise lacking a sense of pride in Vedic Dharma or spiritual tradition.

Unsurprisingly, his advice for the 2009 election was “Vote for BJP for a positive future”.

*UPDATE: There is a “European Freedom Initiative” which acts as an umbrella group for the English Defence League and  other “Defence Leagues”. Although Geller supports the EDL (after temporarily withdrawing her endorsement in June), she is probably keen to ensure that her “Stop Islamization” groups and the “Defence Leagues” remain distinct.

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The Latham-Matthews transcription of The Diary of Samuel Pepys was published between 1970 and 1983 and remains the standard edition. It consists of 11 volumes, including an “Index” and a “Companion” volume, and virtually every day of Pepys’ record comes with one or more footnotes which guide the general reader and the scholar through the text. According to a review in the Times, as quoted on the covers of the modern paperback edition, the work “is one of the glories of contemporary English publishing”.

I first became aware of the scope of this edition a couple of years ago, when I was browsing in the gift shop at St Paul’s Cathedral. The complete set was laid out on display, in the interesting contemporary covers that were designed for a reissue of the year 2000. The books are published by HarperCollins, although the word “California” also appears on the spine, in reference to the University of California being the US publisher. I was impressed by the physical quality of the books, and I purchased the first volume soon after.

The same reissue edition is still available, although HarperCollins has now moved to a Print on Demand service. While Print on Demand is a great boon to publishing and to readers, in this instance the quality of a multi-volume collection has been compromised.

Three volumes are displayed above. On the left is Volume 1, 1660, as printed by the traditional printer. On the right are Volume 11 (the Index) and Volume 3 (1662) from the new Print on Demand printer.

The first problem is the Volume 3  is several millimetres narrower than Volume 11 – the Print on Demand service can’t even maintain uniformity of size with its own books, let alone match the traditionally printed volumes.

Second, the Print on Demand service uses too much glue. Both the Index and 1662 have the same problem here, creating a ridge and crease on the cover:

This is perhaps also why the book does not sit flat, unlike Volume 1 (click to see larger version of this):

Further, the colour of the paper is now different, and the first few pages of Volumes 3 and 11 tend to become “wavy” close to the spine (I’m sure printers have a proper word for that).

I asked HarperCollins about this, and I was told that

We take the quality of our print very seriously and ensure that our Editors are happy with this. These books have been through such a review by our Editorial team and they are happy with these [Print on Demand] versions.

So, that’s alright then.

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Here’s one I missed from last month: from the website of SPUC (Society for the Protection of Unborn Children):

Westminster, 1 December 2011: Members of Parliament joined parents and experts today at Westminster to support a campaign against pornographic sex education programmes in schools.

Safe at School, a campaign of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC), organised a packed meeting entitled “Sex education as sexual sabotage”, co-hosted by the Working Party on the Sexualisation of Children under the Lords and Commons Family and Child Protection Group.

Although downplayed in the SPUC report, a number Muslims were also present; the Muslim Weekly has more:

Among them was Imam Shahid Raza Khan, Director of the Muslim College in London.

…Imam Said Raze Khan gave a short talk in which he emphasised the three basic concepts in Islam: family, spirituality and morality.

He also expressed his full support to SPUC for their “great noble moral campaign in order to protect our children in schools”.

The Chairman of the Conference, John Smeaton, who is the national director of SPUC, thanked Dr A. Majid Katme, spokesman of the Islamic Medical Association, for his work and activities in this campaign among the Muslims in Britain.

However, the star attraction appears to have been none other than Judith Reisman:

…During the meeting, Dr Judith Reisman took delegates back in time to explain why sex education in schools was so explicit.

She explained how sexology pioneer, Dr Alfred Kinsey, invented the myth in the 1940s that children were sexual at birth, a “presupposition which underpins material used in sex and relationships education (SRE) today”.

It is certainly amusing to consider Reisman addressing a meeting at which Muslims were present, given her contempt for the religion: in a column last year for WND, she railed against how “Muslim women are objectively enslaved”, and against “that celebratory Arab mosque near Ground Zero.”

As for her anti-Kinsey obsession, I blogged on this in 2004. Reisman takes the view that Kinsey’s methodology was flawed and that his personal sexual predilections meant that his findings on sexual behaviour in the USA were distorted. That may be reasonable enough so far as it goes, but Reisman expands this into a conspiracy in which societal changes of which she disapproves are the result of ideology rather than macro-sociological processes: by highlighting diverse forms sexual behaviour, Kinsey had normalised deviancy, leading to the sexual revolution and the repeal of laws controlling sexual activity between consenting adults.

Naturally, this is all leading towards to the normalisation of  paedophilia – as Reisman recently explained in conversation with Matt Barber:

…the propaganda has been loud and strong to deny the fact, the aim of homosexual males and now increasingly females is not to have sex with other old guys and get married but to obtain sex with as many boys as possible. 

However, Kinsey’s research is not the only culprit here: when it comes to clerical paedophilia in the Catholic church, Reisman endorses the claims of a  certain Michael Calace, who has discerned “embedded Satanic and occultic imagery” in religious artwork which has supposedly been sexually exciting priests subliminally.

Miss Poppy Dixon has a nice profile of Reisman here. It’s worth noting that Reisman doesn’t want better research on human sexuality: according to a quote attributed to her in the New Yorker in 2004, “One doesn’t measure American sexual habits… That’s not a science.”

As for the various MPs at SPUC’s meeting:

MP for North-East Somerset, Jacob Rees-Mogg, said the meeting was “terrifically important. SPUC’s work is of overwhelming importance for our society”.

…Following the Conference, Jonathan Evans, MP for Cardiff North, and Andrea Leadsom, MP for South Northamptonshire, joined parents in delivering to the Department of Education a 47,000-signature petition to Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, calling for “sex DVDs” to be banned from the country’s primary schools.

Despite her prominence on the issues of abortion restriction and sex education reform, Nadine Dorries MP was not among those present – the SPUC has been critical of her efforts, and that’s likely to have scuppered any chance of even a limited alliance.

The SPUC meeting be seen as part of a strategy of broadening the organisation’s activism along more general Christian Right lines – at the start of this month it announced the launch of a “campaign against gay marriage”.

Meanwhile, Reisman’s trip to Europe took her to other places besides London; according to a recent article on WND:

On her recent trip to Rome, she presented her research to the Alliance of the Holy Family International, including Cardinal Raymond Burke, Cardinal Ricardo Vidal and other leaders of the organization.

A Vatican organizer of the events called Reisman’s work critical to the ministry of the Catholic Church.

Reisman also delivered presentations in Ireland, where she trained nurses and doctors about the true methodology of Kinsey.

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From Newt 2012:

 Several prominent Christian leaders from across the country have signed on to lead the official pastors and leaders faith coalition for Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign.

The Gingrich Faith Leaders Coalition will be led by George Barna who has been hailed as “the most quoted person in the Christian Church today” having founded one of the country’s preeminent Christian polling and market research firms.

…Barna will lead a team of 4 national co-chairs, including Dr. Jim Garlow, the California pastor behind the Proposition 8 Battle, Congressman J.C. Watts, Don Wildmon of the American Family Association, and Mat Staver, Founder and Chairman of Liberty Counsel.

… “For me and the people of faith joining this coalition, this is not a political move; it is a spiritual one” [Garlow said].

Also on board are Tim LaHaye and – from beyond the grave – Jerry Falwell:

Pastor Tim LaHaye has endorsed Newt Gingrich for president, and will be joining his Gingrich Faith Leaders Coalition as a national co-chair.

…”Please prayerfully consider going to the polls on January 21 and help elect Newt Gingrich, a proven conservative who has the best chance of replacing the present occupant of the White House with a man with a proven record of appointing conservatives to office that can return this country to the constitutional principles that God has chosen to bless for over two hundred years” he said.

…”It seems apparent the Republican candidates have come down to two possible winners,” LaHaye said. “As my friend, the late Dr. Jerry Falwell told me personally, ‘Speaker Newt Gingrich is the most qualified man in America to run as president of the United States”… We agree!'”

Falwell’s announced his enthusiasm for Gingrich in 2007, following Gingrich’s admission of an affair:

I have been very impressed with the spiritual maturity of this man and am convinced that he has been honest and forthright in clarifying his past failings and his quest, as a Christian, for God’s forgiveness.

…As a pastor with more than a half-century of experience of working with fallible people, I have ministered to a few men who have experienced moral collapse. I have usually been able to tell which of these men was genuinely seeking forgiveness for their actions. My sense tells me that Mr. Gingrich is such a man. He is today happily married to wife Callista, and committed to being the husband he should be.

…Consequently, I decided earlier this week to invite Mr. Gingrich to come to Liberty University on May 19 as our graduation speaker.

However:

As I stated last year when Sen. John McCain was our commencement speaker, I repeat this year: this is an invitation for Mr. Gingrich, not an endorsement.

Back in October, Liberty University announced a “new course designed by Newt Gingrich”, entitled American Exceptionalism. The course “explores America’s impact on global politics and the biblical foundation of her government”.

LaHaye’s admiration for Gingrich is apparently mutual; according to Newt 2012:

“I am honored to have Tim’s endorsement. His work as both a minister and author is truly unmatched,” said Gingrich. 

One wonders which of LaHaye’s many book Gingrich likes to curl up with: is it the apocalyptic Left Behind series, in which the anti-Christ takes over the UN before Jesus returns to massacre the unbelievers and their horses? Or perhaps Gingrich has skimmed through The Act of Marriage: The Beauty of Sexual Love, which has advice on “sex after sixty” (presumably using a desk is not advised).

George Barna is probably the most significant figure in this bunch – unlike most of the others he’s not a mere Christian Right ideologue, and while “the most quoted person in the Christian Church today” is probably something of an overstatement (has anyone told the Pope?), he enjoys respect across mainstream evangelicalism. The origin of the “most quoted person” quote is obscure – it appears, unsourced, in the blurb for Barna’s 2005 book Revolution. A profile in Christianity Today from 2002 goes for the rather more modest claim that he is “evangelicals’ most-quoted statistician”.

J.C. Watts, meanwhile, is actually a former Congressman, although he is well-known for having served four terms, and his Washington Speakers Bureau blurb describes him as a “visionary conservative leader”. In 2009 he was involved with the New Baptist Covenant alongside Jimmy Carter, although he and Carter later clashed; Watts, who is black, objected to Carter’s claim that opposition to Obama was based on racism.

UPDATE: Bruce Wilson has further background on Barna:

Given the secretive nature of the movement, documenting the involvement of public figures in C. Peter Wagner’s New Apostolic Reformation can be a time-consuming project. Over the last two years I’ve been piecing together evangelical pollster and author George Barna’s considerable involvement in the NAR. Now, as with many such projects long in the gestation, it’s become suddenly politically relevant – because Barna is one of three New Apostolic Reformation figures in Newt Gingrich’s recently created Faith Leaders Coalition.

Bruce draws attention to several suggestive links, including:

…Along with [David] Barton, George Barna shows up on the original Board of Reference of what is perhaps the signature public event of the New Apostolic Reformation, Lou Engle’s The Call [Barna was listed on the Reference Board of The Call International – along withPurpose Drive Life author Rick Warren].

(Hat tip: Right Wing Watch)

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From Rick Womick, State Representative for Tennessee’s 34th District:

Last spring I was approached by several members from the Muslim community who requested, and in some cases demanded, that they be exempt from our U.S. Constitution and Tennessee State Constitution, and fall under the authority of Sharia Law.  Their claim was that Sharia Law comes from the only legitimate god, allah, is universal, and is eternal.  Furthermore, they feel that they must not be “forced” to follow our Constitution and its laws since it is man-made and temporary. I will never agree to such demands.  

I’d like to hear more about this. It’s possible that Womick was accosted by some US equivalent of Anjem Choudary, but I find it difficult to imagine why members of “the Muslim community” would “approach” a right-wing politician to express resentment against the US Constitution. Perhaps some group asked for a form of religious accommodation that Womick thinks is unconstitutional, but it’s impossible to judge from the lack of detail provided.

Womick posted his claim at the end of December, and it forms part of his “rebuttal” to criticism of his call for Muslims to be purged from the US military. Womick made his call in November, at the Tennessee Freedom Coalition’s “Preserving Freedom” anti-Shariah conference in Nashville; as I noted at the time, attendees included Paul Diamond of the UK lobby group Christian Concern, and Diamond used the event to foster links between the two organisations (although there is no indication that Christian Concern shares the TFC’s enthusiasm for the English Defence League).

Womick continues:

I challenge Rep. [Mike] Honda to hold the Muslim community to the same standards he holds the rest of America.  Show us that Islam is not at war with America by requiring that a Proposed Charter of Muslim Understanding be signed by those who profess a peaceful Muslim faith before entering the U.S. military.

This call for a special Muslim loyalty oath was probably inspired by Sam Solomon, who was also at the “Preserving Freedom” conference; Solomon’s own “Proposed Charter of Muslim Understanding” was launched at the House of Lords in 2007, and his Acknowledgements page thanks Diamond for his “legal expertise”. Solomon’s document also comes with a Foreword from Gerard Batten, a UKIP MEP and conspiracy theorist.

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Shocking news: it appears that Andrew Breitbart continues to be dishonest. Charles Johnson writes:

At one of the blogs dedicated to relentlessly stalking and libeling LGF users and me, [LGF user] Frank discovered that one of the administrators, a vile creature who calls himself “Rodan” (real name: Rick Martinez), had posted a threatening video addressed to me — a video that openly praised Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, and promoted the ugly white supremacist novel “The Turner Diaries” with images of the Oklahoma City bombing.

… This is where it gets interesting, because Andrew Breitbart and his cohort Dana Loesch have been frequently linking to this stalker blog… when they want to attack me on Twitter.

…So, in a monumentally mendacious smear, [the stalker blog*] went to my custom Amazon store, used the form at the top left of the page to search for “turner diaries,” and promptly posted the search results page all over Twitter and their blogs, claiming that I was deliberately selling this book in my personal Amazon store.

Breitbart followed up with enthusiaism, writing on Twitter:

Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs is PROFITING from the racist Turner Diaries? How low can the freak go!?

This is an insult to the intelligence: Johnson’s Amazon store brings up any book which is available through Amazon – including Breitbart’s own literary endeavours. Also, Johnson has made it very clear that  he despises The Turner Diaries, so the implied suggestion that the book’s availability somehow reveals some sort of dark truth about him makes no sense.

Of course, this is just a minor incident in Breitbart’s stellar career as a smear-monger, although it’s worth noting as further evidence of why Breitbart is a ludicrous figure who ought to shunned by anyone who cares about honesty and decency in public life. Johnson seems to be a lightning rod for this kind of thing: I recently noted Robert Spencer’s claim that Johnson seeks to justify honour killings.

As is widely known, Breibart, Spencer, and Geller have a particular hatred for Johnson because he used to be a political ally. A few years ago, Little Green Footballs took the same sort of approach as can be found on Jihad Watch: the logo, I recall, was a terrified hippy jumping into the arms of a burka-clad woman at the sight of a green football, and the site hosted a good deal of crude anti-Muslim sentiment among the commentators. Johnson’s targets included the stupidity of Trutherism and elements on the anti-war left that were either pro-Islamist or complacent about the problem, but there was also much that I considered objectionable or unfair.

By his own account, Johnson “left … no, ran away from the right”, and he cites reasons such as the rise of the Christian right in the Republican Party and the willingness of elements of the “counter-jihad” crowd to work with unsavoury groups in Europe. While he sees “the right” as having become more excessive, it’s also apparent that he now has a greater respect for progressive discussion and activism.

Pamela Geller recently wrote to him on Twitter:

On your belly, rotten traitor. Everybody despises you – left and right 

This is an irrelevant jibe – Johnson is running a blog on his own terms, not seeking a position in a political movement. From what I’ve seen of his site over the past couple of years, he writes in good faith, linking to interesting stories and calling things as he sees them. I don’t always agree with his analyses, but he doesn’t pander and he doesn’t seek to distort or manipulate. Whether he ought to be more self-critical about what his blog used to be like is a matter for him (although some former targets may want to press the point), but the blog is today a useful resource. That’s really all that matters.

*Amended for clarity. As seen in the comment below, the author of the “stalker blog” is anxious that we should know that he (or she), rather than Breitbart, is the originator of the smear, which Breitbart has merely promoted and disseminated. Credit where credit is due, as they say. [UPDATE: The author of the first comment below has informed me that, despite giving the “stalker blog” as his url, he is not the author of it. Therefore the previous should read “a fan of the ‘stalker blog'[… etc]”.

UPDATE: The “stalker blog” in question has now shockingly revealed… that Johnson and I have been critical of each other in the past. Back in 2004 I wrote a blog entry about the excessive comments then on the LGF website, and my view that Johnson’s failure to rebuke their authors reflected badly on him. Johnson, noticing this in 2009 (around the time of this), complained on his own site that this was a “smear tactic”.

Naturally, I’m flattered that the past opinions of two bloggers about each other are apparently of sufficient interest to be deemed worth exhibiting several years later. However, I personally remain more concerned to highlight an egregious smear by a national media figure who is a serious player in a political movement.

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From Haaretz:

Israel’s military rabbinate released an educational document ahead of the holiday of Hanukkah last month, featuring a photo of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount without the Dome of the Rock, Haaretz learned on Thursday.

The photo was featured in a packet prepared by the Military Rabbinate issued to Israel Defense Forces bases ahead of Hanukkah, under the section titled “The Festival of Jewish Heroism,” which included an article and a quiz on the Jewish struggle against Hellenistic rule.

…The IDF Spokesman’s Office said… that the educational packet included a photo meant to illustrate Jerusalem during the period of the Second Temple.

“As was explained to the reporter, the Dome of the Rock did not exist at that time, so there was no need for it to appear in the picture,” the IDF said.

Here’s the image, as shown on Haaretz:

The photo was not, however, “released” by the Military Rabbinate – it was apparently taken in 2006 by a certain Mikhail Levit, as can be seen here and here. When compared with other photos taken from a similar angle (such as this stock image), it is surprising not to see the Dome, and a look at the full-size image (as noted by Elder of Ziyon) shows that the edge of the Dome of the Rock building is visible – the Dome itself is hidden by a very strange blob of mist which passes in front of the Dome but then behind the rest of the Temple Mount/Haram Ash-Sharif.

The same image was at the centre of a similar controversy back in 2007, when it was used as a banner logo by Christians United for Israel. CUFI revised the picture following complaints, as seen here:

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Nigerian humanist Igwe reports:

In March, Nigeria’s notorious witch hunter, Helen Ukpabio, is organising a “Deliverance Session” in the United States, according to infomation posted on the web site of the Liberty Gospel Church. The event is slated for March 14-25 at Liberty Gospel Church in Houston, Texas. The program is said to be “12 days of battling with the spirit for freedom.”

…Ukpabio organizes deliverance sessions where she identifies and exorcizes people, mainly children, of witchcraft. Headquartered in Calabar in Southern Nigeria, the Liberty Gospel Church has grown to be a witch hunting church with branches in Nigeria and overseas.

Ukpabio’s advert gives no address for the Liberty Gospel Church in Houston, although one of the phone numbers provided belongs to Glorious Praise Ministries. This church is led by Pastor Jonathan A. David (also known as Jonathan Agba), and Ukpabio was previously there in 2010.

Ukpabio famously featured in a Channel 4 documentary about the plight of child witches in late 2008, and she complains that she has been unfairly maligned – witches who are brought to her church are simply prayed over, and once cured the former witch is reintegrated with his or her family. This is in contrast to other contexts, in which peripatetic healers perform bizarre and abusive rituals, or where children are harmed or abandoned after being identified as being witches.

However, this self-justification ignores several factors. First, children will only ever be safe from harm from witchcraft-related stigmatisation when belief in child witches has been eradicated. Leo is humanist, but it is perfectly possible to be a Christian and to understand that the idea of “child witches” goes against reason and has no support in Biblical teaching. Ukpabio’s teaching keeps this harmful belief alive, and not everyone adversely influenced by her books and DVDs will come to her church.

Second, to tell a child that he or she has caused family misfortune or bereavement through being a witch is obviously grotesquely cruel in itself.

Third, Ukpabio’s behaviour shows that she is malign. Leo again (links added):

Thanks to the activities of a UK based charity, the Stepping Stones Nigeria and its local partners, the problem of witchcraft accusations of children and the ignominious roles of Ukpabio and her Liberty Gospel Church and other ‘superstition miners’ were brought to the attention of the world. Since the broadcast of the documentary, Ukpabio and her thugs at the Liberty Gospel church have been campaigning to undermine Stepping Stones Nigeria and its efforts to tackle and address the problem of child witch hunting in Nigeria.

They brought several lawsuits against SSN and its partners, and lost. They have embarked on a smear campaign using local journalists to publish reports in the media which portrayed the projects of SSN in Nigeria as fraud.

In 2009, Ukpabio mobilized her church members against a local seminar on witchcraft and the rights of the child organised by Stepping Stones and the Nigerian Humanist Movement in Calabar, Cross River State. They invaded the venue, beat me up and stole my personal belongings. While the police were still investigating the matter, Helen Ukpabio and her church members went to court. They sued me, SSN and its partners asking that we pay them millions of dollars in damages for depriving them of the right to believe in witchcraft. Again they lost.

Ukpabio’s targets have included a man who runs a hostel for stigmatised children, whom she denounced as a “wizard”; the governor of Akwa Ibom state, whom she warned to “remember what happened to Saddam Hussein”; and the British actress Sophie Okonedo, who narrated the Channel 4 documentary. Members of Ukpabio’s church have created an abusive website where her critics are attacked in crude terms; I am described there as a murderer and a rapist, and as married to a “mongolis [sic] idiot”. The site was set up by Ukpabio’s webmaster, and has her personal endorsement. (1)

(1) To complicate matters, an unrelated on-line stalker I have in the UK has latched onto this site and made abusive attacks of his own while hiding behind the church’s name. Details here.

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From a 28 December article by Alexander Golts in the Moscow Times:

Russian Railways president Vladimir Yakunin sent a strong message of support last week to Russia’s leaders through the company’s newspaper Gudok: “On behalf of the entire management of Russian Railways, we support the course of democratic development in Russia, and we consider it impossible not to respond to the unprecedentedly shameless campaign to discredit the Russian state. … The filth that has been poured on the state and its leaders [from various opposition groups] has no connection with democracy. Moreover, it is a direct threat to the sovereignty of our country.”

Yakunin’s hard-line stance is not a surprise: back in March he presented a “Dialogue of Civilizations International Prize” to Nursultan Nazarbayev, just prior to elections in Kazakhstan; there is no indication that Nazarbayev’s recent bloody crackdown against strikers in Zhanaozen has led to any sort of re-think.

Yakunin runs the St Andrew the First-Called Foundation, which recently brought the Virgin Mary’s belt from Mount Athos to Russia for a special tour; the Foundation also organises the “World Public Forum Dialogue of Civilisation”, which holds international-level conferences in Rhodes and other locations. Among those involved with the Forum is former Chancellor of Austria Alfred Gusenbauer, who represents another link to Nazarbayev, as well as various dignitaries and academics. The Forum also has links with the US Christian Right – one of the “co-chairmen” is a businessman named Nicholas Papanicolaou, who is involved with the Oak Initiative alongside neo-Pentecostal evangelist Rick Joyner and Gen. “Jerry” Boykin. At the most recent Rhodes event, Yakunin’s wife co-moderated a session on “Maintaining Family Values in the 21st Century” with Larry Jacobs of the World Congress of Families.

Yakunin regards himself as a social commentator, and the Forum has published some of his speeches and articles; in his opening speech at the most recent Rhodes conference, he noted “incompatibility between the neo-liberal interpretation of the system of human rights and the system of human values”, and that “the universal urge to have the ‘freedom’ to say ‘anything and in any form’ has a temporary character and is beginning to fade away”. The WPF website also carries a more recent article, in which he discusses “Dialogue of Civilizations in the Times of Global Transformations”. Here, he shows a bit more sympathy for Russian discontent:

As I view it, lying at the basis of the events taking place in Russia – events of which we are both witnesses and participants – there is a maturing feeling of all-embracing injustice. This injustice or unfairness concerns the life we are leading; this injustice pertains to the arbitrariness of official functionaries; this also holds true of the unfairness concerning the blatant disregard on the part of the oligarchic elite of business circles for their country and their people; and, of course, this concerns the impermissible property inequality that we are witnessing.

However:

…having come face-to-face with a systemic crisis in the USA itself, a crisis that has swerved out of control of the financial system, the Americans, especially on the threshold of elections and with the unemployment rate hopping above 8%, must, by hook or by crook, shift the point of tensions to another place. The ways and means of attaining these goals are only too well known – a triumphant but not very blood-spilling war, destabilization and conflicts further away from the borders of the USA and Europe, shaping and molding the scarecrow of a threat (read: enemy) for general public consumption (such scarecrow candidates, as is known, are always close at hand).

Whether accidentally or not, but the crisis of the world social system is accompanied by a cold-blooded destruction of ancient centers and monuments of Ecumene – the cradles of the whole earthly civilization, and this includes the museums in Iraq and Libya, manuscripts in Egypt and architectural monuments of Carthage in Tunisia, to say nothing already of the destruction of the Orthodox Holy places in Serbia and Pristina.

It’s difficult to reconcile this lofty criticism with Yakunin’s role in the political realities of modern Russia, as described in Golts’ Moscow Times article:

During Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s annual call-in television show two weeks ago, employees of Uralvagonzavod, a factory in Nizhny Tagil that manufactures train cars, called in and offered to help break up the Moscow demonstrations, if necessary… Valery Yakushev, a Uralvagonzavod factory worker and State Duma deputy for United Russia, showered Putin with support during the call-in show.

…This is no surprise considering that the bright prospects for Uralvagonzavod recounted by factory worker Yakushev are a direct result of state subsidies — 2 billion rubles ($64.2 million) last year and 64 billion rubles ($2.1 billion) that Putin has personally promised for this year.

…One other interesting tidbit from the whole Uralvagonzavod affair: The factory’s chairman of the board is Yevgeny Shkolov, who, according to news reports, worked in the 1980s alongside Putin at the KGB station in Dresden. What’s more, Russian Railways head Yakunin, whose subordinates so strongly express their support for Putin and who loves to buy up tens of thousands of train cars from Uralvagonzavod, also worked for the KGB. Yakunin, together with Putin, was also one of the founders of the Ozero dacha community in the Leningrad region in the 1990s.

And by a strange coincidence, most members of Ozero, who showed little business talent in the 1990s, suddenly became some of the country’s most successful millionaires and billionaires at the same time that Putin rose to power. Meanwhile, Uralvagonzavod reached record levels of production when Putin’s friend and colleague, Yakunin, took over Russian Railways and started ordering train cars as if they were hot piroshki.

Meanwhile, the St Andrew Foundation is currently leading protests against the recent arrest in Greece of Archimandrite Ephraim, abbot of the Vatopedi monastery on Mount Athos (and home of the Virgin Mary’s belt).

UPDATE: Meanwhile, a minion working for President Medvedev gave his own opinion of the protestors in December. According to The Week:

RUSSIA’S unfolding political crisis has descended into farce after President Dmitry Medvedev appeared to take to Twitter to accuse opposition activists of being “stupid sheep getting fucked in the mouth”.

…Nobody believes the president is responsible, but it is a blow to his image as a tech-savvy leader. The Kremlin blamed an unidentified official and said: “The guilty will be punished.”

I suspect that a story doing the rounds (e.g. Private Eye 1305 p. 12) that Vladimir Putin had refered to protestors as “sodomized sheep” during a TV phone-in is a garbled version of this story, conflated with an incident in which Putin mocked protestors’ white ribbons as being “condoms”.

*Spelling variation (cough): “Putin had refered to protestors as sodomised sheep”.

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