Bartholomew's Notes

Back to Jerusalem, where Tony Blair faces an unlikely rival in his efforts to bring peace:

David Lynch, on a five-day visit to Israel to encourage transcendental meditation, met with Israeli President and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shimon Peres…”Real peace is not just the absence of war, but the absence of all suffering, all negativity,” Lynch said…”Change comes from within. From the first meditation, boom, you’re there.”

Peres showed he keeps up with the movies:

“Lynch is one of the greatest directors of our generation and a giant artist on his own, and it is a great honor for the state of Israel to host you and listen to you…”

Alas, Peres did not share with us his favourite Lynch film.

Lynch has been an enthusiast of TM for many years, and practitioners have been concerned with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for some time; the Jerusalem Post reported in 2002 that

A small number of meditators can stop terrorism in the Middle East, a leading US scientist told a Tel Aviv news conference yesterday.

“We have an important message for the people of the Middle East,” said Dr. John Hagelin, a quantum physicist and author, and recipient of the prestigious Kilby Award for scientific research.

“If the square root of 1 percent of the population regularly practice Transcendental Meditation (TM) techniques in a group, the wave effect of calm will eventually halt terrorism,” he claimed.

There is also apparently a small Natural Law Party of Israel, connected to the movement. A 2006 report notes how the TM practice of Yogic Flying was used to counter Hezbollah:

Reuven Zelinkovsky was a colonel in the Israeli army, but now he has renounced military might to join a squadron of yogic flyers at the Sea of Galilee to throw a “shield of invincibility” around the Jewish state.

…Here in Israel, according to a formula that says the square root of one percent of a country’s population is the number needed to tap into a collective consciousness robust enough to create a “shield of invincibility,” 265 people are needed.

But Zelinkovsky’s squadron, which includes architects, health workers and pensioners, many of whom are also teachers of TM, now numbers only about 20 after falling from a peak of 65 last week.

However, other New Religious Movements also feel they have something to offer the region: we’ve noted plans by Rev Moon to establish a peace centre in Galilee, and the promotion of a booklet by L. Ron Hubbard. And let’s not forget the famous plans of the Raelians to build an embassy in Jerusalem for the benefit of visiting extra-terrestrials.

(Hat tip: Cult News Network)

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News that George Bush has honoured the Dalai Lama with a Congressional Gold Medal leads me to revisit an early blog entry, from October 2004. That was when Pastor Mariano Yeo of the Shalom Alliance Fellowship in California suggested a link between the Dalai Lama’s visit to the University of Florida and the arrival of hurricanes:

Yeo believes the Dalai Lama is the world’s foremost proponent of idolatry. “Everywhere he goes disaster follows him,” Yeo observes. “The University of Miami conferred an honorary doctorate on him right before the hurricanes hit,” he notes. Yeo also correlated the unusual timing of earthquakes following Dalai Lama visits to India and Southern California.

We wait with bated breath…

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WorldNetDaily’s Aaron Klein has an update from Jerusalem, as plans are suggested for the division of the city:

WND had learned key Jerusalem neighborhoods mentions as slated for possible evacuation are owned by a U.S. Jewish group that over the years has allowed tens of thousands of Arabs to illegally squat on its land, resulting in the current Arab majority.

The US group is the Jewish National Fund, and under the subheading “‘Leftist millionaires’ influencing JNF?”, Klein tells us that

…Asked to explain why the esteemed Jewish organization would allow Arabs to illegally occupy strategic land purchased for Jews, one JNF source involved in land acquisition pointed to what he claimed was the “disproportionate influence” over the organization by a small group of Jewish multimillionaires in New Jersey who lead major public fundraising efforts for JNF…The Jews include the Wilf, Halpern, Zuckerman and Tisch families, according to the JNF source.

Funnily, WorldNetDaily had a rather different attitude when the Greek Orthodox Christian Patriarchate cancelled a deal with an Israeli settler group called Ateret Cohanim, which in 2005 plotted to lease church-owned land near the Jaffa Gate in a Palestinian part of Jerusalem. Despite the fact that fraud was apparently involved (the church’s financial officer is missing, reportedly in South America), when the church repudiated the arrangement Joseph Farah predictably editorialised that this was simply anti-Jewish racism, since Jews should be allowed to live anywhere in Jerusalem. Palestinians daring to live on Jewish-owned land, however, is another matter.

It’s also worth noting that while Klein is keen to name some American “Jewish millionaires”, he’s never felt the need to mention Ateret Cohanim’s bankroller, LA-based property developer and casino owner Irwin Moskowitz, perhaps because of Moskowitz’s reportedly rather sanguinary views. This is despite Klein having had cosy chats with Moskowitz’s son-in-law and man in Jerualem, Aryeh King.

(Klein’s distorted reporting is subject which I have chronicled on numerous occasions, most recently here; Terry Krepel at Conwebwatch has also produced several in-depth essays. I have also kept an eye on the Greek Orthodox leasing scandal, which still has numerous loose ends. See here)

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“Let our distinguished academics see how Orthodox people treat their pseudo-theories”

Interfax-Religion reports on the most bizarre anti-Darwinian protest yet, from the Union of the Orthodox Banner-Bearers and the Union of Orthodox Brotherhood in Russia. Apparently the pious members bought a toy monkey, which they then set upon:

The banner-bearers drove the stake in the monkey’s chest. As Leonid Simonovich-Nikshich, the head of the union, explained to onlookers, “it is exactly how satanic cults were punished in old times”.

Then the banner-bearers carried the monkey’s coffin on their shoulders behind Sts Cyril and Methodius’s monument, promising to bury it some place outside the city. “Let our distinguished academics see how Orthodox people treat their pseudo-theories”, Simonovich-Nikshich said.

This is only the silliest in a series of stunts by the Banner-Bearers: recently we’ve had a more predictable burning of a Harry Potter book (“It burns well”, Simonovich-Nikshich noted); last year a picture of Madonna got the Van Helsing treatment. Simonovich-Nikshich warned then that:

“We declare a new Holy Inquisition that will fight against the sacrilege of crosses, icons, Russian Orthodox symbols, including during Madonna’s show. The singer is an advocate of Kabbalah,”

However,

The main goal of the inquisition will be “to fight against slander, rather than to kill people,” he said.

An interesting academic article here by Stella Rock has some background:

The Union of Orthodox Banner-Bearers…was co-founded in 1993 by Leonid Simonovich…The contemporary Union of Banner-Bearers follows the Black Hundreds precedent of denying membership even to converted Jews…For Simonovich and the members of his Union, we are living in the Last Days, and politics is an irrelevance…America is castigated as a secular Satan, whose crime in bombing the Serbs is not her interference in the affairs of another state, but her decision to take up arms against an Orthodox country…Simonovich resurrected a more important fundamental – the Patristic declaration that a synagogue is a refuge of demons. Simonovich’s organisation also seeks to resurrect the medieval myth of Jewish ritual murder as evidence of the Jewish threat, publicly calling for the canonisation of Andriushy Iushchinsky, whom Jews were accused of murdering in 1911, and declaring that the murder of Tsar Paul I bore the hallmarks of a ‘Masonic’ ritual killing…Further threats to the integrity of Russian Orthodoxy are offered by Roman Catholics, NATO and the West…

Name variation: “Union of Orthodox Gonfalon-Bearers”

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“I wanted to write and edit a book, a research on the problem of homosexuality in the clergy…it was merely an experiment”

Monsignor Tommaso Stenico, recently:

I am fascinated by the Magisterium of Benedict XVI…[The church] has not been wrong in opposing civilian legislation which undermines ethics and morals in a catastrophic way.*

What “civilian legislation” would that be? Stenico does not say, but this quote from the Pope obviously springs to mind:

Benedict stressed that marriage between man and woman was the cornerstone of society and not some “casual sociological construction” that could be replaced.

“It’s a serious error to obscure the value and function of the legitimate family founded on matrimony, attributing to other forms of unions improper legal recognition, for which there really is no social need,” he said.

Monsignor Tommaso Stenico, a few days ago:

The Vatican said Saturday it has suspended a monsignor from a senior post at the Holy See after an Italian TV program using a hidden camera recorded him making advances to a young man and asserting that gay sex was not sinful.

The Vatican did not identify the monsignor by name. But Monsignor Tommaso Stenico confirmed in a telephone interview with The Associated Press that he had been suspended from his post at the Vatican’s Congregation for Clergy, an office which aims to ensure proper conduct by priests.

…The man La Repubblica identified as the Vatican official can be heard saying that “he didn’t feel he was sinning” by having sex with gay men and asking his visitor if he liked him.

However, Stenico has since come up with an interesting explanation:

I’m OK. I wanted to write and edit a book, a research on the problem of homosexuality in the clergy. Because today the devil is inside the Church and the Pope is left alone. So I used the Internet and looked for gay sites. I contacted that boy and he came to see me. It would have been last July, I don’t recall exactly, but it was not a Sunday. The point is the TV channel had earned my good faith…but in substance, it was merely an experiment, a study on the subject … and I fell into a trap. I will explain all to my superiors.*

I’m sure Ted Haggard wishes he had thought of that one. No word from Mike Jones so far.

Stenico has a website, which is currently down. Details about Stenico in English are hard to come by, but he has apparently edited two volumes of Pope Benedict’s discourses. He is also a trained psychoanalyst.

*Taken from translations that have appeared on the Papa Ratzinger Forum derived from PETRUS. Italian originals here (cached version only available) and here.

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Filmed extremists “stretched the limits, but it was hyped”

Abu Usamah “the last buffer” for radicalised Muslims

The BBC’s Newsnight has an interesting follow-up on Undercover Mosque, the Channel 4 documentary about Islamic extremism at a prominent Birmingham mosque and some other locations. The West Midlands Police spent thousands of pounds reviewing unused footage from the documentary, at first to see if any of those featured the programme had committed any offences. As I blogged at the time, one speaker was shown making joking pig-snorting noises as he suggested all Jews should be killed, while Saudi-trained Abu Usamah was seen telling listeners that:

…No one loves the kuffaar! Not a single person here from the Muslims loves the kuffaar. Whether those kuffaar are from the UK or from the US. We love the people of Islam and we hate the people of kuffaar. We hate the kuffaar!

Newsnight highlights some other footage of Abu Usamah, in which he opines that although he disagrees with the “methodology” of Osama bin Laden, he is worth “a million George Bushes” because he is a Muslim, and that non-Muslims are “pathological liars”.

However, the police decided that there was insufficient evidence to act, and instead decided to investigate whether the programme was “distorted”. The result was that the police force asked the Crown Prosecution Service to consider prosecuting the programme-makers for stirring-up racial hatred under the 1986 Public Order Act; CPS lawyer Bethan David advised them that this would have no chance of success, and instead suggested that they should complain to Ofcom, the UK television regulator.

The police complaint to Ofcom was unprecedented, and according to barrister Sarah Palin it was an act which went beyond police’s remit (Palin co-represented the BBC at the Hutton enquiry, alongside the QC who successfully represented journalist Donal MacIntyre in his libel case against Kent Police. She has also acted in a number of libel cases, and has written an article against the secrecy surrounding family courts). In the opinion of Newsnight, which reviewed transcripts of the unseen footage, the programme “wasn’t distorted”.

Newsnight journalist Peter Marshall explains why the complaint was made, revealing a political context:

Sources in the West Midlands force told me, “What some speakers said in that film stretched the limits, but it was hyped. If that’s all Channel 4 got in months filming undercover, it wasn’t very good.”

They also said the police are keen to maintain good relations with the mosque, and with characters like Abu Usamah, because they’re against terrorism.

The sources describe them as “the last buffer before radicalised people fall off into the abyss. It’s not so much the police wanting to keep in with them, as with keep talking and understanding”.

Maintaining “good relations” apparently includes trying to intimidate critical investigative journalists with legal threats and making complaints about the quality of TV programmes.

It’s good to see BBC Newsnight looking closely at a Channel 4 documentary on Islamism, since they could learn a thing or two: last year Newsnight conducted an exposé of the radical Islamist group Hizb ut Tahrir, relying heavily on material derived from VIGIL, a private and shadowy investigative group. Alas, it was later shown that VIGIL and those associated with it have a rather weird agenda of their own.

(Hat-tip: MediaWatchWatch)

Name variation: Abu Usama

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Nazareth-based website Come and See has a collection of photographs and a You Tube link chronicling the funeral of Rami Ayyad, the 30-year-old Palestinian Christian activist who was murdered – almost certainly by Islamists – at the weekend in Gaza. Ayyad worked for Gaza’s Bible Society bookshop, which was bombed back in April. The shop opened in 1999, and according to a 2000 Bible Society report, it was a welcome presence:

The Bible Society Bookshop which opened here almost a year ago has been warmly welcomed by the people of Gaza, reports the Bible Society in the West Bank (BSWB).

…Almost as soon as it opened, the bookshop received an invitation from the Ministry of Culture to take part in book exhibitions in Gaza and Ramallah and to be part of the Palestinian section at other bookfairs in the Arab world.

…the people of Gaza feel that they have been forgotten by the outside world. But many local Christians feel that the opening of the Bible Society bookshop marks a turning point for Gaza. George, a member of the Baptist church in Gaza City, describes the bookshop as a “testament of love to our people.”

A report by Arieh Cohen at Asia News has details of reactions to the killing:

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, immediately issued a statement calling the killing “a desperate attempt to sabotage the good social relations in Palestinian society and the friendly relations between Christian and Muslims”.

Hamas authorities, who manage security in Gaza, have promised to punish “without pity” the authors of the crime who, “compromise the security and stability of our people”.

In Gaza there are around 3,200 Christians – Greek Orthodox, Catholic and protestant – compared to a Muslim population of circa 1.5 million. Relations between the two communities, by and large are calm, united by the same ethnic roots. The rising Islamic fundamentalism in Gaza and in the Palestinian world is however creating increasing incidents between the two. During the Hamas takeover, vandals ransacked a Catholic convent and an adjacent Rosary Sisters school, breakingcrosses and smashing the face of a ceramic Jesus. No one claimed responsibility, and Hamas vehemently denied involvement.

Back in June, Christian Today carried a report that was cautiously hopeful about the future of Christians under Hamas:

Open Doors, an international ministry working with persecuted Christian, said although it fears a worsening of living conditions for Gaza inhabitants, it does not think Christians will be attacked by the Islamic fundamentalist group.

…However, Janssen noted that he hopes the conversations between Hamas leaders and Open Doors founder Brother Andrew “will bear some fruit.”

Brother Andrew had built a relationship spanning over a decade with Hamas leaders. In December 1992, over a thousand Hamas leaders were deported from Israel and left on the side of a mountain in Lebanon. Brother Andrew had flew in and visited the Hamas camp in a humanitarian way and gave Bibles and his book “God’s Smuggler” to them, who in turn invited Brother Andrew into their tent for a meal.

This was all very well – but given that Brother Andrew also hopes to convert the militants, one wonders how effective his advocacy for Palestinian Christians could be (I blogged on Open Doors just a few days ago). In August, things were looking more dodgy, when Sana al-Sayegh, a Christian woman academic, converted to Islam. Fatah alleged that she had been forcibly converted after being kidnapped, and the murky business has never been resolved. The conservative Cybercast News Service noted that:

According to a report in Middle East Newsline last week, Hamas is moving fast against non-Muslims in the area. Fatah officials who spoke to the news service on condition of anonymity said Hamas is pressing leaders of the 2,000-member Christian community to either convert to Islam or emigrate.

(I wasn’t able to track down the Middle East Newsline report to confirm this)

However, Fatah’s complaint against Hamas might carry more weight if it wasn’t trying to outdo the Islamists with a new Morality Police enforcing compliance with Ramadan.

**

Meanwhile, the murder of Ayyad is also an occasion for ghoulish point-scoring by certain supporters of Israel who couldn’t have given a toss about Gazan Christians when they were living under direct Israeli occupation. Step forward, Melanie Phillips:

…the Islamist religious terror being perpetrated in Gaza is also going virtually unremarked by the British media. I don’t recall reading this in the mainstream press:

Phillips goes on to quote a short report which cites an AP report on the tragedy. The AP report can be seen on various sites, including that of…The Guardian. But this kind of willful distortion of the facts is Phillips’ stock-in-trade – another example was noted at Pickled Politics yesterday. I find it very difficult to see how anyone who values good sense or intellectual integrity would take her seriously.

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The website of Craig Murray – which was pulled after an Uzbek-Russian billionaire paid a firm of lawyers to write a nasty letter to his webhost – is back online.

Meanwhile, Oliver Kamm has promised to give us new details on his legal spat with Neil Clark, a rival blogger and journalist who issued a writ against against him after he pointed out some deficiencies in Clark’s work. Says Kamm:

I merely record how I have gone about defending myself – and, not to overstate the case, the principles of free speech and fair comment on matters of public interest – against admittedly unintimidating and worthless threats of legal action, in the hope that the account may prove interesting to other bloggers. Libel threats against bloggers are highly likely to be an issue that will arise in some other, less farcical, form in future.

Indeed.

I disagree with Kamm’s positions on a number of subjects, but his method of arguing is a model of careful reasoning and close attention to detail, and one occasionally gets introduced to a new word. He is also someone who understands the seriousness of what is at stake when legal threats are used to suppress free speech, and he is willing to take a stand.

Incidentally, Neil Clark is not the only British blogger to have attempted to silence a fellow writer through threatening legal action: another example is Paul Staines, who blogs as “Guido Fawkes“. Staines threatened an action against blogger Sunny Hundal after Hundal quoted an old newspaper report about him found on Lexis-Nexis; the story can be read here. Staines, it is worth noting, is a member of the supposedly “libertarian Right”.

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God backs Richard Roberts on financial mismanagement allegation; John Hagee to investigate

Left Behind Games (and others), take note: Richard Roberts, son of legendary evangelist Oral Roberts, has just received a message from the Almighty, which he passed on at a recent campus chapel service:

“We live in a litigious society. Anyone can get mad and file a lawsuit against another person whether they have a legitimate case or not.”

Well, we all know that – but God was apparently moved to remind Roberts of the fact because he (Roberts) is facing a lawsuit over alleged financial abuses:

Richard Roberts is accused of illegal involvement in a local political campaign and lavish spending at donors’ expense, including numerous home remodeling projects, use of the university jet for his daughter’s senior trip to the Bahamas, and a red Mercedes convertible and a Lexus SUV for his wife, Lindsay.

One allegation is particularly weird:

Mrs. Roberts – who is a member of the board of regents and is referred to as ORU’s “first lady” on the university’s Web site – frequently had cell-phone bills of more than $800 per month, with hundreds of text messages sent between 1 a.m. to 3 a.m. to “underage males who had been provided phones at university expense.”

The claims came to light after a confidential internal report prepared by Richard Roberts’s sister-in-law was found by a student and passed to a professor. A group of professors then handed the document to the board of regents, and they complain they were consequently dismissed. According to God, though, as revealed to Roberts:

“This lawsuit…is about intimidation, blackmail and extortion”.

The AP also tells us that

San Antonio televangelist John Hagee, a member of the ORU board of regents, said the university’s executive board “is conducting a full and thorough investigation.”

Well, I wouldn’t hold my breath there – Hagee has himself been a target for criticisms over his very generous remuneration.  The San Antonio Express-News reported in 2003:

According to income tax statements that GETV [Global Evangelism Television] filed with the Internal Revenue Service, the nonprofit organization drew $18.3 million in revenue in 2001, the most recent year the organization submitted a return to the IRS. That year, Hagee’s total compensation package amounted to more than $1.25 million.

“I’m amazed at the income,” said Pamela Smith, an accounting professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio…Smith said she wasn’t aware of any nonprofit director in San Antonio who earned more than Hagee.

Critics complained that because Hagee family members were appointed as ministry officers, there was a “conflict of interest”, since  they could all “determine their own salaries, benefits and other forms of compensation.” Another conflict was that Hagee enjoyed royalty payments on products promoted through the donation-funded GETV – a practice specifically forbidden by the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability.

(Hat tip: Pharyngula)

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Just a few weeks after a New York businessman decided to withdraw a libel suit against PZ Myers for calling him a “crackpot” in a book review, someone else is turning to legal threats to squash critical comment.

This time it’s a company, Left Behind Games. Left Behind, of course, was a series of apocalyptic novels written by conservative evangelicals Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, in which the anti-Christ becomes Secretary General of the United Nations and inaugurates a one-world government before his forces are massacred by Jesus at the Second Coming. Tens of millions of copies have been sold.

Left Behind Games was established to create a series of Christian video games based on the books, but the results have not been well-received: there have been complaints from Christians and non-Christians that the game is violent and promotes a paranoid world-view; gamers generally found the game uninteresting. LBG, seeing its share-price tumble, tried a PR counter-attack: it was pointed out that players lose points when they shoot the enemy; according to former CEO Jeff Frichner:

…”You can win the game by not firing a shot, but by conducting spiritual warfare. There’s a prayer button (and) a worship button…”

A consultant brought in to market the game to Asia praised it as “non-violent”, which is odd; as I noted at the time, Jerry Jenkins and Frichner argue that the game’s violence should be put in a Biblical context, while LaHaye has complained that it is no more violent than other games.

However, LBG has now taken off the gloves; a poster to Daily Kos has the latest:

Gordon D. Katz, an attorney for [CEO Troy] Lyndon’s company, has recently sent letters – some via certified mail, and others via his Gmail account — to blogs large and small which have either criticized the game, or linked to news reports on the [alleged – RB] eliminationist theology of the game, or even feature critiques, satirical statements, or harshly worded opinions from blog readers. Radical Congruency received two identical, saber-rattling letters.

Here’s an extract:

…Unfortunately, there are many statements on your website which appear to be false and misleading. This type of misinformation may cause significant and irreparable harm to Left Behind Video Games Inc. and must be removed…If you do not comply immediately, the company will be forced to pursue additional legal action which will include claims for damages, costs of suit and attorney’s fees. This may subject you and your organization to significant legal and financial damages.

By failing to make clear what exactly is being objected to, the letter fails as a serious legal document. Doubtless the hope is that fearful bloggers will simply self-censor anything that might be negative. But who is Gordon D. Katz? The Daily Kos poster did some digging, and found out that the office is actually a private house belonging to Katz’s mother, and that his named “Administrator” is none other than Lyndon’s wife. Most curious.

Criticisms of the game are not confined to blogs – newspapers and magazines have covered the controversy, and it is even referenced in Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion. Since Dawkins is published in the UK, perhaps LBG could get tips on using UK libel law from Sheik Khalid bin Mahfouz or Alisher Usmanov.

UPDATE: Gamer sites are unimpressed.

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