Bartholomew's Notes

From Reuters:

At least 17 people died at a prayer meeting in rural Nigeria after apparently breathing noxious fumes from their power generator while asleep, police and witnesses said on Wednesday…

…One survivor, Linus Abba, said the victims were attacked by the evil spirits they were trying to exorcise.

“I heard strange noises and noticed that the room where we slept was filled with smoke, that is all I can remember because I fainted,” Abba told Reuters. “It was a terrible attack by the forces of darkness that we came to fight.”

From the Nigerian Tribune:

According to one of the survivors, Linus Abba, the prayer had just ended when he left for the toilet. He, however, said he lost consciousness and slipped in the toilet and could not remember any other thing until he later became conscious at a nearby community hospital.

From the Nigerian This Day:

One of the survivors, Linus Abba, recounted that the prayer had just ended when he entered the toilet to answer the call of nature, but lost consciousness after noticing smoke covering the whole room and a mysterious dwarf figure in human form.

He said he must have lost consciousness as he could not remember any other thing until he regained consciousness later at a nearby community hospital.

Across the border in Ghana, a current bestseller is The Revival of Secular Humanism, by two prominent Pentecostal leaders. The authors apparently complain that the goal of humanism is to undermine faith in the Bible, and that placing a priority on reason and science leads to child pornography.

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The headline refers to Obama’s unfortunate mix-up between the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz with the American liberation of Buchenwald. Back in May Aaron Klein described this as a “gaffe”, but apparently he now feels the need to imply some kind of Holocaust denial, perhaps having realised that it is absolutely impossible to insult or underestimate the intelligence of WND‘s target readership.

Of course, WND would never distort the Holocaust for its own purposes, and certainly not in a highly disrespectful and tasteless way:

The above picture and caption appeared in a WND puff-piece for anti-evolution film called Darwin’s Deadly Legacy. The film was condemned by the Anti-Defamation League for trivalizing the Holocaust.

Meanwhile, Ed Brayton has an excellent put-down of the WND-editor and all his works here.

(Hat tip: ConWebWatch)

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Pastor John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel, in 2006:

[The world is] standing on the brink of a nuclear Armageddon…We are on a countdown to crisis. The coming nuclear showdown with Iran is a certainty…That war will affect every nation on earth, including America, and will affect every person on planet earth.”

Also:

Israel will come back, and I believe that this next round will be more severe, more aggressive, and the moment that Israel determines that Iran has nuclear capability or buys a nuclear weapon from North Korea that they will bomb the nuclear facilities in Iran or go after Iran. And then it is really going to become intense in the Middle East…I think the United States and Israel should keep their ear to the ground, and the moment that they feel that Iran has a nuclear device that they need to take out the nuclear capabilities of that country. Make no mistake, Iran will use nuclear weapons against Israel and use nuclear weapons against the United States of America. Even if it’s a nuclear suitcase bomb, they will do everything in their power to get it in the hands of sleeper cells that are already in the United States of America.

David Brog, executive director of Christians United for Israel, 2008:

In recent months, many commentators have been talking about the inevitability of Iran getting a nuclear weapon.  Others have been discussing the inevitability of an Israeli or American military strike against Iran.  Yet neither of these supposedly “inevitable” options bodes well for the peace and security of Israel or her neighbors.  Before accepting either such outcome as inevitable, it is time to redouble our efforts to stop Iran from enriching uranium through the most effective tools at our disposal:  economic sanctions, divestment and diplomacy.

Given that Brog is Jewish it is hardly suprisingly he would hold such a view: unlike Hagee, who is obsessed with the sanguinary events of the Last Days, Brog doubtless has a long-term view of Israel which doesn’t involve Jesus coming back to save the day (despite his position at CUFI, he doesn’t appear to adhere to Christianity or Messianic Judaism).

Brog’s statement is calculated to obscure Hagee’s apocalyptic theology in the run-up to next week’s CUFI “Washingon-Israel Summit“, at which Joseph Lieberman and the Israeli ambassador will be speakers. CUFI is desperate to appear moderate following the McCain endorsement fiasco: Walid Shoebat – co-author of God’s War on Terror: Islam, Prophecy, and the Bible, which argues that Muslims are under the control of the anti-Christ – disappeared from the speaker line-up a couple of weeks ago.

(Hat tip: Sarah Posner, who also gets to the bottom of the Hagee-Jim Hutchens spilt, which I blogged here. I blogged on David Brog here.)

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