Bartholomew's Notes

Just for fun, here’s the most amusing anti-Obama headline I’ve seen* (via Conwebwatch):

* NB: Excluding articles by people named Pastor J. Grank Swank

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From OneNewsNow, under the heading “Israel fears potential Obama presidency”:

Evangelist and Middle East expert Tom Doyle says the people of Israel are very concerned about a possible Barack Obama presidency in the United States.

…Israelis have told him they are concerned about a possible Barack Obama presidency.

“This is what I heard over and over: we have a candidate who was born Muslim. He has a Muslim name, and he claims that he’s converted to Christianity. But in the Middle East when you do that, usually you change your name to a Christian name,” Doyle points out. “All we can interpret is that he’s still a Muslim — which wouldn’t bode well for Israel — or at least has strong Islamic roots, and there’s a real nervousness.”

Doyle is the author of Two Nations Under God: Why You Should Care About Israel, and he has a blog here, in which he describes his missionary efforts in Afghanistan and in Israel. He also has close links with Joel C Rosenberg, whom I blogged here. The missionary organisation he works for is called “E3 Partners” (formerly “Global Missionary Fellowship”); the President of the organisation, Curtis Hail, has his own blog here.

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Annie Jacobsen mocks Muslim opposition to Barbie dolls:

“Barbie is an emissary of nudity and promotes moral corruption,” wrote the hardliner [Iranian] newspaper Kahyan. [In Saudi Arabia] the ban-Barbie effort was huge. The religious police, or Mutaween, hung colorful posters outlawing “Jewish Barbie dolls” in schools and hospitals across the country…

Such hysteria over a mass-produced American doll is surely a sign of morbid paranoia in the Islamic world; thank goodness the West is more sensible…

From Fox News:

A doll some are claiming utters pro-Islam and even satanic messages has outraged parents in Oklahoma and Pennsylvania.

People insist they can hear Fisher-Price’s “Little Mommy Real Loving Baby Cuddle and Coo” mumbling “Islam is the light” and “Satan is king,” according to KJRH.com and MyFOXKC.com.

KJRH has a recording of the doll, and a statement from Fisher Price:

The Little Mommy Cuddle ‘n Coo dolls feature realistic baby sounds including cooing, giggling, and baby babble with no real sentence structure. The only scripted word the doll says is “mama.” There is a sound that may resemble something close to the word “night, right, or light.”…

Back in 2006 I blogged on WorldNetDaily‘s promotion of Rape of the Soul, a documentary which claims that Catholic art contains hidden sexual and satanic images that incite priests to commit abuse. Then as now, the claims tell us more about the people making them than what is objectively there.

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Someone’s not keen on my postings (here and here) speculating about the cover-art changes to The Third Jihad DVD. An anonymous commentator graced my first posting with the assessment “you are a moron”, and in the second instance offered the opinion that:

I don’t see any resemblance at all. I think you’d be better off hunting the Loch Ness [sic] or something.

Fair enough. Unexpectedly, however, both messages come from the same IP address in South Africa, and they appeared quite quickly after my postings.

By coincidence, South Africa happens to be the home of Third Jihad director Wayne Kopping. I wonder if my nemesis knows him?

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Further details at my Ambassadors for Moon blog.

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…at least as it appears on the Clarion Fund website. Here’s the new one, on the left, compared to a previous version, to the right:

A couple of weeks ago I raised the suggestion of a physical resemblance between the man on the right and someone else (my point being, although I didn’t spell it out, that the picture had perhaps been chosen because of a resemblance to Obama).

I didn’t get much feedback beyond a commentator venturing the opinion that “you are a moron”.

It should be noted (a) that the Clarion Fund website carried material explictly endorsing McCain until it came to general notice; (b) that the Clarion Fund’sObsession DVD giveaway apparently targeted swing states; and (c) that at least one of the “experts” featured in the Obsession film – namely Walid Shoebat – has been known to promote the conspiracy theory that Obama is “really” a Muslim.

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Daily Mail hack Peter Oborne provides what is perhaps the most preposterous opening to an article on the global financial crisis from a serious journalist:

Western civilisation was founded upon one astonishingly revolutionary idea: free will.  This doctrine, taught by Jesus Christ 2,000 years ago, held that all human beings are responsible for their actions.  Sinners went to Hell. Criminals were punished. Debtors were sent to prison.

This philosophy prevailed for centuries and did not come under serious challenge until Karl Marx made the compelling case that rather than being subject to free will, everyone was a victim of uncontrollable social forces.  Sigmund Freud had a similar message  –  undermining the idea of individuality by arguing that we are all driven by our subconscious, and therefore shaped by urges we cannot begin to understand.

As a result of these two great intellectual powerhouses, the idea of individual free will became subverted.

…And the upshot of that was that stigma surrounding debt collapsed in the 1960s, leading to reckless borrowing and now demands for bail outs.

Journalistic attempts at grandiose and sweeping openings are usually risible, but this has to be one of the worst examples I’ve ever seen. Firstly, where exactly does Jesus pronounce on the subject of “free will”? Secondly, “free will” was discussed and disputed by Greek philosophers centuries before Jesus, and the debate has continued ever since. And rather than teaching simply that “sinners went to Hell”, the traditional Christian view is that everyone is a sinner and that the only way to avoid damnation is through Christ’s Atonement – which is actually a cosmic-scale “bail-out plan” for the unworthy. And just because Oborne went to a posh Catholic school (Sherborne) doesn’t excuse ignorance of some strands in Protestant theology: Calvin on free will is a more complex subject than is often supposed, but the perception that he opposed it has been influential for a long time. And here’s Martin Luther:

So, if we believe that Satan is the Prince of this World…and that he does not let prisoners go unless he is driven out by the power of the Divine Spirit, it is again apparent that there can be no “free-will”…

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An update on Peter Mullen. First, from the comments on Ruth Gledhill’s blog:

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An e-Newsletter from James Hutchens’ Jerusalem Connection introduces a certain Bill Wilson, who bandwagons the current financial crisis to push a “New World Order” conspiracy theory:

The United States is leading the world into a “new world order” where financial systems will be taken over by governments and coordinated by a central committee of the ruling elite. Using the cover of media catch phrases like “the worst financial crisis since the market crash of 1929,” the Federal government and Congress have frightened Americans into relinquishing wide sweeping powers of private home ownership and financial independence to a powerful central figure in the government–the Treasury Secretary. The Treasury Secretary is now emboldened to create a one-world order economy without the approval or even the knowledge of the people whose tax money he will use. … Who would have thought that America would lead us there?…The world is at the very least preparing a type and shadow of the one world system used by the antichrist as prophesied in Revelation 13:16-17.

Wilson is apparently a journalist, and he runs a radio show and blog called The Daily Jot, where he rails against “B. Hussein Obama” (a sure sign of crankdom). He is also associated with the Christian Zionist “Koenig’s International News” website, and he has written a book, entitled WARSHOD: Living Victoriously in the End Times. The volume has a Crusader soldier on the cover, and a particularly clunky blurb on the back:

More than any time in the history of the world, there are vast connections between Bible prophecies, the nation of Israel, the Church international leadership, and world events that are hurling humanity toward the end times at a rate that is exponentially accelerating with each passing day. International Christian communicator and journalist Bill Wilson shares from a unique perspective just how these current events are connected with Bible prophecy using information that you will not be able to find anywhere else.

Wilson is also associated with a “Word of Faith Ministry and Chapel” in Mt Airey, Maryland, which does not appear to have a website. While he was writing the book his computer’s hard drive crashed, but the manuscript was saved and further “attacks” were held off the “prayer covering” of his pastor, Gerry Baker.

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The ever-absurd Debbie Schlussel turns to self-parody as she rails against the anti-Semitic practice of affirming “the false claim by Arabs that falafel, hummus, and other Middle-Eastern food is ‘Arabic’ food”:

In fact, Jews have been eating these dishes for centuries, longer than there has been an Islam or an Arabian empire, as I’ve pointed out. These foods are an intrinsic part of Sephardic [“Spanish”/Orientalist/Asian] Jewish culture and history…Yes, now, those who hate Jews and Israel have resorted even to lying about Mid-Eastern food for their attacks and fraudulent public relations.

And for good measure, for no apparent reason she throws in the claim that “Christians tend to disavow any association with being Arabic”.

Schlussel was moved to outrage by a review of the book Cuisines of the Axis of Evil, by Chris Fair, but her complaint comes as a new conflict between Israel and Lebanon looms:

Lebanese food makers aim to prove that dishes including hummus originated in their country in a campaign to stop Israeli manufacturers from using the names to market the same foods.

“Our battle is to prove that all these names and specialities and foods are Lebanese, as Greece did with feta cheese,” said Fadi Abboud, president of the Association of Lebanese Industrialists.

…”The row with Israel is very easy (to win), because clearly Israel did not have a common food culture before it was formed,” said Sami Zubaida, an expert on the history of Middle Eastern food. “What is a problem is to say that they are specifically Lebanese as opposed to Syrian, or Palestinian or southern Turkish,” he said.

Of course, there’s no reason to doubt that Sephardic Jews have been “eating these dishes for centuries”, but that hardly resolves the question of origins – and it’s more sensible to think in terms of a shared middle-eastern heritage rather than “Sephardic Jewish” vs “Arabic” (or vs “Coptic” or “Syriac” etc). Ken Albala (Food Historian at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California) has written a book entitled Beans: A History, which touches on the controversy over falafel (p. 85):

…The origins of the dish are of course unknown, but one could probably trace an ancestor back to an earlier cuisine, most likely to Egypt where a similar dish is made with fava beans (ta’amiyya). That any one people could own falafel is of course a ridiculous notion, but it nonetheless illustrates a very common tendency – to associate a people with a particular food and then claim it as an integral part of national identity.

In 2004 the word “Falaphilia” was coined, although it failed to catch on.

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