Bartholomew's Notes

The Times of India reports:

BANGALORE: Hundreds of people descended on a merchant’s house in Bangalore on Friday to witness what they believe is a miracle – the Shirdi Sai Baba idol is purported to have opened its left eye.

…The devotee couple Babu (45) and his wife Lakshmi took the marble idol to clean on Wednesday evening to prepare for the Thursday puja.

The idol had some black mark on its left chin and the couple’s son Dhrupad, who was cleaning the eye, suddenly felt some change in the idol – the eyelash seemed moving. The devotees were astounded and stopped the cleaning work.

On Thursday morning, they found the left eye of Baba had opened.

Via Sathya Sai Baba

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From a press release:

Former PLO terrorist, Walid Shoebat will join Counter-Terrorism experts from Israel in a Changing World Symposium: Preparing Law Enforcement Executives for the Future, a homeland security conference, being held in Austin, Texas at the Renaissance Austin Hotel (9721 Arboretum Boulevard) on July 21-22, 2008. Attending will be some 300 senior law enforcement officials from across Texas…Over the past decade, Shoebat has been on a mission of peace, traveling the country educating students, the public and law enforcement agencies on the mind set and dangers of Fundamentalist Islam.

The conference is being co-sponsored by Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott and is organised by JINSA, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.

Shoebat’s “message of peace”, of course, is anything but: he is a virulent Christian Zionist fundamentalist who believes that Muslims are under the direction of the anti-Christ. Here’s Shoebat’s “expertise” at its finest:

I discussed this preposterous and ignorant exegesis at more length than it deserved here.

Shoebat’s website also includes a video produced by his son Theodore that expresses absolute hatred of Islam and science (Charles Darwin, naturally), and his belief that militarized Christianity is the answer to both (I blogged this here). The Jerusalem Post, among others, has also raised questions about Shoebat’s supposed past.

JINSA’s executive director is Thomas Neumann, who has a distinguished background in various high-profile American Jewish organisations. The board of advisers includes Kenneth Blackwell, John Bolton, Richard Pearle, and James Woolsey, among others such as Sheriff Kevin Beary, who featured on this blog a while ago. It may be recalled that someone had written to a local newspaper suggesting that Beary was an enthusiast of tasering because he was too fat to chase criminals; Beary used his official position to find out the writer’s home address, and he sent her a letter accusing her of slander.

Greg Abbott, meanwhile, is mainly known for a massive invesigation into “voter fraud” which turned up only a handful of cases (all black and Hispanic Democrats), and for defending the addition of “under God” to the Texas pledge of allegiance.

UPDATE: Keith Davies, Shoebat’s “handler”, has graced us with his presence in the comments section, see below.

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A few days ago the centre-right think-tank Policy Exchange held a seminar on libel tourism, as it explains on its website:

Policy Exchange takes great pleasure in inviting you to a lunchtime seminar entitled “Libel Tourism – Does UK Law Need Reform?”…This growing phenomenon of “libel tourism”, where non-English citizens travel to England in order to press libel charges on US citizens whose work is protected under US law – shows the willingness of courts in this country to extend libel laws well beyond the boundaries of England. This has been seen by many as a great threat to the right of free speech in the West.

The case of Rachel Ehrenfeld and Funding Evil inevitably loomed large. Martin Bright wrote a short report for the New Statesman:

Sean O’Neill of the Times raised the concern that journalists were becoming increasingly cowed by threats from libel lawyers representing rich individuals and Islamists. Others on the panel, including Anthony Julius, were critical of newspapers which failed to take the fight to litigious individuals.

I now believe there needs to be a serious review of the law surrounding freedom of expression in this country. Joanne Cash, the libel barrister and Conservative parliamentary candidate for North Westminster, who was hosting the event, agrees with me. So watch this space.

I’m glad in particular to see Julius taking a stand against “litigious individuals”. Of course, there are some ironies here: in Decemcer Policy Exchange threatened to sue BBC Newsnight for libel – famously declaring it would battle the programme “to trial or capitulation” (although it hasn’t done either so far). And while Ehrenfeld’s British lawyer was denouncing Saudi libel tourism a few years ago, he was quite happy to help an Israeli academic engage in the same practice against an American-Palestinian last month – and I wonder if that more recent case got mentioned at Policy Exchange?

Meanwhile, the daftly-named but useful New York State “Libel Terrorism Protection Bill” looks set to become federal law in the USA, with Arlen Specter and Joseph Liberman  sponsoring the Free Speech Protection Act of 2008. They explain how this would work in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal:

Our bill bars U.S. courts from enforcing libel judgments issued in foreign courts against U.S. residents, if the speech would not be libelous under American law. The bill also permits American authors and publishers to countersue if the material is protected by the First Amendment. If a jury finds that the foreign suit is part of a scheme to suppress free speech rights, it may award treble damages.

UPDATE: Harry’s Place has more on the Policy Exchange seminar. And in the US, a similar Bill to that of Specter and Lieberman is currently being proposed to counter “religious defamation” claims.

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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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Reuters reports on Christian Zionist disillusionment with Ehud Olmert:

Olmert raised about $70,000 for the New Jerusalem Foundation at a single Christian fundraiser in Dallas in 2002. But this year, the evangelical leader who helped organise that event voiced “outrage” at Olmert’s starting talks about sharing the city with the Palestinians as part of the U.S.-backed Annapolis process. He vowed to “do everything in my power” to prevent it.

Curiously, the donation figure is considerably smaller than was reported at the time, in the Jerusalem Post:

More than 4,000 Christians gathered in this Dallas, Texas, suburb Sunday to mark the 35th anniversary of the reunification of Jerusalem, offering prayers for Israel’s capital and donations to its children who have fallen victims to terrorism.

…[Mike Evans] reported that participants in the Dallas gathering gave more than $400,000 in cash and pledges, and that all gifts would go to the New Jerusalem Foundation for the victims of terrorism in Jerusalem.

Maybe those “pledges” never amounted to much.

Evans – who believes God struck Franklin Roosevelt dead for his failure to be more supportive of Zionism – has for a while now been railing against George Bush’s “betrayal” of Jerusalem, and doubtless it is he who is now going to “everything in his power” to oppose Annapolis.

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From the Koran (Sura 112, “Al-Ikhlas”, or “Purity of Faith”):

Say: He, Allah, is One. Allah is He on Whom all depend. He begets not, nor is He begotten. And none is like Him.

There is a commentary on this by a Muslim scholar named Abdullah Yusuf Ali (d. 1953), in his The Meaning of the Holy Qur’an:

…we must not think of [Allah] as having a son or a father, for that would mean to import animal qualities into our conception of Him.

This is of course a Muslim critique of the Christian idea of the Trinity; Judaism takes a similar line, as seen for example in Chapter Three of Hasdai Crescas’s fourteenth-century The Refutation of the Christian Principles:

We say: if the son were generated, then God would be generated. This follows from your statement that each one of them is God…

The Islamic critique is the subject of a new letter by Archbishop Rowan Williams, addressed to Muslims (emphasis added):

Here it is important to state unequivocally that the association of any other being with God is expressly rejected by the Christian theological tradition. Since the earliest Councils of the Church, Christian thinkers sought to clarify how, when we speak of the Father ‘begetting’ the Son, we must put out of our minds any suggestion that this is a physical thing, a process or event like the processes and events that happen in the world. They insisted that the name ‘God’ is not the name of a person like a human person, a limited being with a father and mother and a place that they inhabit within the world. ‘God’ is the name of a kind of life, a ‘nature’ or essence – eternal and self-sufficient life, always active, needing nothing. But that life is lived, so Christians have always held, eternally and simultaneously as three interrelated agencies are made known to us in the history of God’s revelation to the Hebrew people and in the life of Jesus and what flows from it. God is at once the source of divine life, the expression of that life and the active power that communicates that life. This takes us at once into consideration of the Trinitarian language used by Christians to speak of God. We recognise that this is difficult, sometimes offensive, to Muslims; but it is all the more important for the sake of open and careful dialogue that we try to clarify what we do and do not mean by it, and so trust that what follows will be read in this spirit.

Daily Mail headline (also reproduced on WorldNetDaily):

Archbishop of Canterbury: ‘Christian doctrine is offensive to Muslims’

(Hat tip: NT Wrong)

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A few days ago it was reported by Bruce Wilson, Max Blumenthal, and Sam Stein that a PR firm employed by John Hagee Ministries had succeeded in getting YouTube to remove videos featuring clips of Hagee’s controversial sermons. The PR firm was 5WPR, and 5W’s Senior Vice President Juda Engelmayer is listed as the contact for Hagee’s Christians United for Israel’s press relations.

Meanwhile, 5WPR has also been involved with defending a firm called Agriprocessors, which is the USA’s largest producer of Kosher meat. Agriprocessors has come under fire for a range of issues following an immigration raid on one of its plants, but the firm received supportive comments on a critical blog in the name of Morris Allen, a Conservative Rabbi with expertise in ethical kashrut practices. However, the Rabbi had not made the comments – and, as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports, one of them was traced back to Engelmayer’s apartment.

The JTA tells us that an intern has confessed that he sent the comment from Engelmayer’s apartment without his knowledge during a get-together; however, it also reports the president of 5WPR as saying that “A senior staff member failed to be transparent in dealing with client matters. He has taken full responsibility”. Other fraudulent postings came from IPs belonging to 5WPR.

The blog to which the comments were posted is Failed Messiah, which writes critically about ultra-Orthodox Judaism and the theocratic right in Israel.

The Jerusalem Post adds the detail that 5WPR’s clients

include McDonald’s, pornographer Joe Francis of Girls Gone Wild, Pastor John Hagee and a slew of right-wing Jewish organizations.

Gawker has more fun with the story.

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From MyFox Houston, 2 July:

The distribution of Qurans in a southwest Houston neighborhood has some residents worried about the motives of the group who dispersed the Islamic book.

But some residents, like Greg and Sue Ann Pieri, said they feared the group is imposing its beliefs on non-Muslims and found the gesture offensive.

“If we went into a Muslim country and left a bible, we would be in prison and then decapitated a few years later,” said Sue Ann Pieri, who chose not to destroy the book like other neighbors did.

According to the accompanying video, Pieri rescued serveral copies from the garbage “out of respect for Islam”. The same video shows hack Duarte Geraldino breathlessly reenacting how the Korans were delivered:

Whoever dropped off the Korans had to walk up the driveway, then the Koran was put in a plastic bag and either left at the doorstep here or on the doorknob of the house, so that people couldn’t open their doors without picking up the Muslim Holy Book – an outrage to some.

Charlie Butts at American Family Association news site OneNewsNow reported on the same incident ten days later:

A resident of the area — who asked to remain anonymous — made the discovery. She said she found a white plastic bag hanging on her door, and inside was an English copy of the Koran along with a flyer that read, “Please accept this gift from your Muslim neighbors.”

“If I were to go to their country and leave my Bible, I would be persecuted,” she notes…She collected the unwanted Korans and took them to a safe sight [sic] to be handled…

Interesting that Butts found a quote similar to that of Pieri’s, and that this anonymous resident also rescued unwanted copies. But that, unlike Pieri, this person decided to infer to Butts that Muslims are not Americans. At the risk of being pedantic, it may be of relevance that Butts is unprofessionally slapdash with his direct quote of the flyer, which in fact reads

Dear Neighbor,
Please accept the enclosed book as a free gift from the Muslim community
Sincerely,
The Book of Signs Foundation
on behalf of the Muslim community

The Book of Signs Foundation also did a distribution recently in Wheaton, catching the attention of the Chicago Tribune, which managed to find some less hysterical reactions:

…one woman said she didn’t know what a Quran was and didn’t know what she was going to do with it. Most others said they would read through it.

“I’ve read literature about the Quran, but never read the Quran,” said Kevin Ritchie, 46. He said he would read the book but remain skeptical about the religion. “I think they’ve got a right to pass them out, but I’m pretty much set with my religion,” Ritchie said.

The report also explains the delivery process:

Their chosen approach is non-invasive…Paid workers who distribute the Qurans don’t make the rounds in the rain and never leave books on the ground.

However, it should be noted that there actually is an Islamist link: the Book of Signs Foundation website is slightly mysterious,  but the Tribune and other sites identify the the organisation with the al-Furqaan Foundation, which has a Gideon-like mission of “Delivering THE MESSAGE of THE QUR’AN to Everyone in America”. According to the Foundation website, the Korans come with a preface by Dr. Zakir Naik, President of the Islamic Research Foundation and a former student of the late Ahmed Deedat. Deedat was famous for copying the techniques of Christian fundamentalists, penning a numerous tracts opposing other religions and attempting to prove the Koran through scientific arguments, and Naik follows the same method. If you’re willing to wade through the rhetoric, M. Zuhdi Jasser of the neo-conservative-linked American Islamic Forum for Democracy has noted more of the organisation’s Islamist links, with links to sources, at (cough) Family Security Matters.

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