Bartholomew's Notes

A predictable opinion from Metropolitan Seraphim, Greek Orthodox bishop of Piraeus; a few days ago he

said that the Bilderbergers represented a “criminal cabal of world Zionism and its efforts to set up a cruel world dictatorship under the headship of Lucifer”.

I last blogged on the rancorous Seraphim here; it’s remarkable that such an abusive person can achieve high office in the national church of a modern European country.

The recent Bilderberg meeting in Greece was also protested by LAOS, the “Popular Orthodox Rally”; I blogged on this group in 2005.

Meanwhile, baroque anti-Bilderberg conspiracy mongering is also being pushed by WorldNetDaily (although minus the anti-Semitism), in order to flog some books:

Do you ever wonder what all those secret organizations – the Trilateral Commission, the Council of Foreign Relations, the Bilderbergs – are doing and why? And what it means in your life?

Here’s the answer: The “Brotherhood of Darkness” book in which Stanley Monteith outlines the people, power and purses that, in many opinions, control nations and destinies, which was in the No. 1 spot among best-sellers at WND’s online Superstore this week.

Monteith writes in his incredible but true publication how the secret societies direct the courses of civilization and affect your life.

Also:

“Hope of the Wicked: Master Plan to Rule the World” by Ted Flynn is in third place.

Hundreds of pages, photographs and footnotes document the convergence of multinational corporations, foundations and political and social instruments to assemble a one-world government and the “New World Order.”

I blogged Flynn’s book here.

(However, as Terry Krepel has noted, there is one media-shy think-tank with political links that WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah doesn’t see as part of the conspiracy: the Council for National Polity. That’s apparently because he’s a member.)

A March report in the EUObserver included a quote which has been seized on as evidence of a Bilderberg hidden hand:

A meeting in June in Europe of the Bilderberg Group – an informal club of leading politicians, businessmen and thinkers chaired by [former EU commissioner Etienne] Davignon – could also “improve understanding” on future action, in the same way it helped create the euro in the 1990s, he said.

Blogger “Cranmer” described this as

an astonishing disclosure, especially in the light of all those alleged Bilderbergers who have dismissed as ‘conspiracy theorists‘ those who have ventured to suggest the group has any such agenda to ‘improve understanding’ (a distinctly Orwellian inculcation), or that they ‘helped create the euro’ (by helping to remove those who opposed it…).

However, the “disclosure” becomes less “astonishing” when you read the rest of the Davignon quote:

“When we were having debates on the euro, people [at Bilderberg events] could explain why it was worth taking risks and the others, for whom the formal policy was not to believe in it, were not obliged not to listen and had to stand up and come up with real arguments.”

In other words, it helped to create the Euro by…facilitating frank private debate between people with different views. How sinister (Cranmer’s claim that the group “helped to remove” anti-Euro figures is unsupported by the source he links to, and his suggestion that members deny seeking to “improve understanding” makes no sense, even without the vacuous Orwell reference).

I’m all in favour of keeping a sceptical eye on what political and economic power-players are up to, and I have no problem with using such conflabs to publicise the need for accountability (as with the G20 protests). It’s also doubtless the case that networks between and within organisations help to promote particular ideas (Mike Peter’s 1996 essay on Bilderberg, originally in Lobster magazine, treats it in this way). But let’s keep some sense of proportion: where’s the evidence that Bilderberg meetings give decisions made in the real world any extra protection from public scrutiny and opposition? And while we may be curious about how important these meetings actually are, what exactly in political life remains mysterious without recourse to “Bilderberg” as an explanation?

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Kathryn Joyce has a typically insightful article at Double X, on attitudes to domestic violence at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church. She quotes some audio clips of Teaching Pastor Tom Holladay (who is married to Warren’s sister), who explains that domestic abuse means regular beatings, not a one-off attack, and that a woman is never justified in seeking a divorce on grounds of violence:

“There’s something in me that wishes there was a Bible verse that says if they abuse you in this and such kind of way then you can leave them,” said Holladay, but sadly, he concluded, there wasn’t.

Kathryn adds, tellingly:

The clips were removed from the website this spring, in the months after Warren, the casual-Friday face of “new Evangelicals,” spoke at President Barack Obama’s inauguration.

This kind of PR-conscious revisionism seems to be something of a pattern with Warren and co.

Kathryn also tells the story of Sheri Ferber, a Saddleback member who asked a pastor for advice about her violent husband; the pastor’s response was to warn the husband about her “gossip”. Ferber seventually separated from her husband, who filed for divorce after reminding her that “The wife’s body does not belong to her alone, but also to her husband” (first half of 1 Corinthians 7:4). When Ferber then went on to file a police complaint, she experienced a “slow freeze” and a lack of support when her ex-husband – who originally belonged to a different church and was under a restraining order – joined the Saddleback choir. Kathryn asks Holladay about this; his response is (it seems to me) creepy and passive-aggressive:

“I don’t think I can sit here and call her a liar. I don’t know what she’s been through and is going through. As a church, our goal is healing. It might make her feel good to see her story in a newspaper. It might make her feel bad—depending on how you report it. It doesn’t sound untrue to me, but you’re obviously hearing one side of the story, and it sounds like someone’s added a layer of hurt. We don’t want to go down roads that would hurt this person more.”

Ferber now attends her ex-husband’s former Pentecostal church, and I was struck by this observation:

Ironically, the family that stuck by her wasn’t Saddleback, but [her ex-husband’s] Life Church, which responded swiftly to the abuse by pulling Bradley from leadership and later accompanying Ferber to court: something Ferber attributes to the difference between Baptist and Pentecostal approaches to women’s roles in the church.

Read the whole thing here; Kathryn deftly guides us through the wider context of marriage teaching and wifely submission within conservative evangelicalism.

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An obscure person in Jeddah by the name of Adel Mohammed S Alshareef has helpfully provided the ammo for another “Muslim apocalypse” horror story: on 8 May a German news agency reported that a Saudi Arabian had attempted to patent a satellite tracking device which could be inserted under the skin. He included in his application a “Model B”, in which the chip could contain a deadly poison that could be released by remote control; the patent was consequently rejected on ethical grounds.

The report then made its way into English, and featured in a German English-language site called The Local:

“In recent times the number of people sought by security forces has increased,” the Jeddah-based inventor wrote in his summary.

The tiny electronic device, dubbed the “Killer Chip” by Swiss daily Tagesanzeiger, would be suited for tracking fugitives from justice, terrorists, illegal immigrants, criminals, political opponents, defectors, domestic help, and Saudi Arabians who don’t return home from pilgrimages. 

“I  apply for these reasons and for reasons of state security and the security of citizens,” the statement reads.

The story was from there picked up by Fox and WorldNetDaily, which both homed in on the Saudi angle; right-wing blogs have now added some predicable commentary. Jihad Watch describes the device as “Another great Islamic invention”, while Atlas Shrugs gives us:

ISLAM PLAYS WITH TECHNOLOGY

Is this what Obama means about their great “contributions” to society.  Instant death chip implant. Perfect ……. Christians, Jews stay out of Islamic ORs.

Joel Richardson, however, outdoes both with the suggestion that the proposed device was predicted in the Book of Revelation:

He ordered them to set up an image in honor of the beast who was wounded by the sword and yet lived. He was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that it could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed. Revelation 13:14-15

The documentation for the invention is available from DEPATISnet, the German patent database; the document is numbered DE102007051890A1, and is entitled “Implantation von elektronischen Chips in den Körper des Menschen zum Zwecke der Bestimming seines geografischen Aufenthaltsortes”. Unfortunately I cannot read German, and even if I could I wouldn’t be in a position to judge if the proposed device is technologically viable. Details of the lethal “Model B” appear on page two, paragraph 0007 (1).

The abstract gives the inventor’s list of those whom he believes need to be tracked:

Zusammenfassung: In der letzten Zeit hat sich die Anzahl der von den Sicherheitsbehörden gesuchten Personen vermehrt. Darunter sind Flüchtlinge der Justiz, darunter sind Terroristen, darunter sind Personen, die dem System der Aufenthaltsregularien und der Arbeitserlaubnis zuwiderhandeln, und Arbeitskräfte, die den Obhutspersonen entfliehen (AdÜ: Regulation der Obhutsperson für auslän dische Arbeitskräfte in Saudi-Arabien), sowie der Staatssicherheit gefährliche Personen, seien as nun Personen der politischen Opposition oder Abtrünnige usw. Zusätzlich zu diesen vorab genannten Personen kommen noch die Personnen, die nach der Saison der großen Pilgerfahrt (Hagj) und kleinen Pilgerfahrt (Omra) –dies ist spezifisch für Saudi-Arabien in diesem Fall – zurückbleiben.

Judging from a Babelfish translation, it looks as though the Local report was slightly distorted; the inventor is worried about pilgrims coming to Saudi Arabia and remaining, not Saudi Arabians using pilgrimage to escape from the country. From what I can see, he also doesn’t suggest who exactly ought to have the “Model B” version inserted.

A comment added to one news report noted that in the 1970s Jack Vance imagined a society in which the population was obliged to wear explosive collars; there are obvious parallels with other science-fiction stories (Escape from New York comes to mind). The idea is of course  inherently repellent on human rights grounds, and in the real world there is also no way such a thing could be made safe from accidental detonation through injury or due to other electronic sources that might trigger it. However, the inventor claims to be worried about “Terroristen”, and this is a fear which has proved to be corrosive to higher ideals in a number of countries. If he has come up with his invention at the behest of the Saudi government (or the anti-Christ), it is strange that he should be seeking a European patent as a private person.

(1) The document initally appears as a one-page unsearchable pdf, which can be misleading; to see the other pages you need to click on a forward button or click on “Load Full Document”.

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On 5 May I noted the following quote from a WND article:

Talk radio host Michael Savage is considering legal action against Britain’s top homeland security official after she released today a list grouping him with terrorists and neo-Nazi murderers banned from entry because the government believes their views might provoke violence.

…The others on the list are Jewish extremist Mike Guzovsky…

I suggested this reference was an oversight; Guzovsky, also known as “Yekutel Ben Yaacov” (spelt in a variety of ways) has in the past been the subject of several positive articles by WND‘s Jerusalem correspondent Aaron Klein.

And it seems I was right; the entry has now been amended to

…The others on the list are Jewish nationalist Mike Guzovsky…

Here’s the ADL on Guzovsky:

Under Guzovsky’s leadership, Kahane Chai has signaled its support of a bombing incident directed against American Jewish supporters of the Middle East peace process. On January 5, 1994, between 2:30 and 3:30 a.m., one bomb was placed outside a New York build ing that houses Americans for Peace Now, Habonim, Israel Horizons, and the Progressive Zionist Caucus. It did not explode, but was later defused by police.

A second bomb, placed outside the building which houses the New Israel Fund, exploded but there were no injuries. Notes left with the bombs declared that a Jewish “civil war has begun.” The notes also spoke of the “spilling of blood in Israel” and criticized the Israeli Government as being “too liberal.”” The notes were signed by the “Shield of David” and the “Maccabee Squad.” A press release issued by Kahane Chai provided its traditional response subsequent to such incidents: the organization “denied responsibility” for the attacks, but “refuse[d] to condemn the act. Responding to a reporter’s query regarding the incident, Guzovsky said, “We don’t condemn anybody targeting Jewish groups which, in our opinion, caused the deaths of so many Jews at the hands of Arab terrorists that they embrace.”

In February 1994 he opined that Rabin was a traitor and that “if violence has to be used to prevent this destruction of the Jewish state, so be it”; he also later spoke favourably of Baruch Goldstein, perpertrator of the Hebron massacre.

Curiously, however, WND has not explained why the “extremist” label is inappropriate for this man. Neither has it offered any defence of Guzovsky against the UK government ban, despite providing predictable support to Michael Savage.

(Hat tip: Conwebwatch)

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WorldNetDaily has found another worthy book to promote:

The Beatles meteoric rise, unprecedented in popular culture and unrivaled nearly four decades after the band broke up, is at least partly explained, says a new book, by a pact John Lennon made with the Devil.

In “The Lennon Prophecy,” author Joseph Niezgoda reveals that Lennon himself, obsessed with the occult, magic, numerology and being bigger than Elvis Presley, confided in his friend Tony Sheridan that he made such a deal. The book also makes the case that the “death clues” long associated with Paul McCartney were actually subliminal messages hinting at Lennon’s fate.

Niezgoda claims that the pact was made in December 1960, and was fulfilled twenty years later, when the demonically-possessed Mark Chapman shot Lennon dead:

“I have always had to deal with the constant conflict of my love for their music and the evil that I perceive surrounds it,” he told WND. “The only difference is that I have tried to define or make sense of it with the help of this book.”

Niezgoda does not appear to be promoting any particular religious view, but the idea of evil around certain popular music echoes an established genre of fundamentalist paperbacks which see rock music as a manifestation of Satan’s purposes; this essay by Johnny Marr overviews some earlier efforts, including Bob Larson’s Rock & Roll: The Devil’s Diversion and Jeff Godwin’s Dancing With Demons. Observes Marr:

In the realm of crackpot literature, few sub-genres surpass anti-rock ‘n’ roll literature in sheer quality. Like the finest fringe literature, they are suffused with paranoia, rabid passion and a refreshingly original take on conventional logic. Their philosophy combines the best elements of fundamentalist zealotry, Communist conspiracy, and bizarre pseudo science.

More recently, we’ve had William Josiah Sutton’s Ancient Prophecies About Mysticism Hollywood and the Music Industry (includes details of “Mick Jagger’s Connection with the Marxist Fabian Society and the Occult Revolution”) and various internet essays, such as Donald Phau’s “The Satanic Roots of ‘Rock'”  (“The year 1967 marked a significant escalation in open cultural warfare against the youth of the United States.”), and other pieces that have been linked from this site (includes “Elvis or Evils?” and “The Dixie Chicks are of the Devil“).

Alas, reviews of Niezgoda’s research have been somewhat negative; Buck McPherson of the Anniston Star complains that

Niezgoda sees clues where there are none (backwards lyrics, cryptic album artwork, etc.), and in most cases, makes a fool of himself trying to prove these far-reaching and preposterous connections. He even alleges that the band’s album title Revolver foreshadowed how Lennon would be killed. Is it so hard to believe that Lennon, along with Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr simply wrote brilliant pop songs at the same time that pop music was quickly becoming a cultural phenomenon?

Another reviewer calls it “easily the funniest book I have ever read.”

Niezgoda has a website here, where he expounds on seven clues which supposedly indicate Lennon’s deal with the devil. These include a picture of Lennon standing near a sign that says “The Best Way to Go is by M & D Co[aches]”. Niezgoda explains:

A photo from the Magical Mystery Tour album shows John walking in front of a sign which reads ‘THE BEST WAY TO GO IS BY M&DC’ or MDC. It turns out to be a fatal message because it was Mark David Chapman (initials MDC) who killed John. This picture is unedited and is shown just as it appeared in the 1967 album.

Another album features Lennon’s face on the label; surrounded by the grooves of the various tracks, is this clearly shows “picture of John at the center of a target with the record’s center-hole resting right between his eyes” (Actually, the hole is on the left side of his nose, but  let’s not quibble). The book is published by New Chapter Press, although it does not currently feature on the company’s website.

This kind of nonsense is of course typical WND fare; in 2006 it promoted a documentarycalled Rape of the Soul, which claimed that the Roman Catholic sex abuse crisis was “tied to embedded Satanic and occultic imagery in its artwork”.

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Earlier this year the Sun ran a front-page splash claiming that Sir Alan Sugar was on a hitlist of British Jews to be targeted by Muslim extremists, based on evidence from self-styled “anti-terror” investigator Glen Jenvey gleaned from a Muslim discussion forum. Blogger Tim Ireland of Bloggerheads discovered that the “evidence” had in fact been planted by Jenvey; the result was that the Sun removed the story and Sugar threatened legal action.

I’ve written a number of blog entries on the subject since then, noting subsequent developments and making a few minor contributions of my own (such as here), which Tim has used and acknowledged. In particular, Tim unearthed a recording of Jenvey talking to a journalist, in which he boasts of links with Patrick Mercer MP, a British diplomat named Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, and a lecturer named Michael Starkey (a distant cousin of Cowper-Coles). Cowper-Coles and Mercer have distanced themselves from Jenvey, but there has not been much media interest, besides short pieces in the Media section of the Guardian and in Private Eye. Perhaps this is because so many media outlets have relied on Jenvey’s material that they’d all rather not talk about it (he was even used by Newsnight once); perhaps there is also some annoyance at a blogger showing them up. Since the initial revelation we’ve seen Jenvey’s public response: a bizarre conspiracy theory about the Guardian, which was helpfully promoted for him by an evangelical journalist named Jeremy Reynalds; and his private responses: a physical threat against Tim, and fake comments to blogs supposedly from the Daily Mail accusing Tim of being a sex criminal.

The main story is ongoing, but the saga has also sparked some spin-offs of interest. For my own part, I have been playing close attention to one of Jenvey’s few remaining defenders, the virulent anti-Muslim blogger Paul Ray (aka “Lionheart”); while Jenvey has kept a low profile of late, he has shown an interest through Facebook in “March for England”, with which Ray also has close links.

Meanwhile, Tim has been drawn into a dispute with A-list conservative bloggers Iain Dale and Paul Staines. He and they have clashed on numerous issues over the years; most notably last year, when Staines used fellow Tory-blogger and lawyer Donal Blaney to convey a libel threat (a typical course of action which has more than once exposed the humbug of the “libertarian” Tory right when it comes to free speech and critical investigation on-line). In the wake of Jenvey’s malicious behaviour, however, Dale apparently agreed to help Tim get into contact with Patrick Mercer but then failed to deliver. Tim claims Dale misled him in the process, and Tim went to some efforts to get through to Dale how serious the situation was. Dale’s response was to publish a blog entry accusing Tim of being a stalker, which was picked up by various sympathetic blogs. Tim left a response on one, which was followed soon after by a comment from a certain Adam Macqueen addressed to another commentator:

Oh my god! You made eye contact with the nutter on the bus! You should never, ever do this. I found this out the hard way a few months back…

This is actually shockingly shabby, for reasons that Tim went on to note:

In one of those coincidences that continues to make life delightful, Adam MacQueen is the man responsible for Private Eye taking credit for the discovery of the connection between the ‘Richard Tims’ alias and Glen Jenvey.

It was Jenvey who finally lost it and started accusing me of paedophilia… i.e. because I took the risk on the story for which MacQueen took credit.

Tim then sent an email to Macqueen, who responded that he was justified in calling Tim a “nutter”

Because you obsessively trawl the internet responding to every single comment you dislike.

I complained about Private Eye‘s failure to credit Tim for his research at the time; to find that the journalist concerned would further stoop to such conduct is disheartening. PE‘s editor Ian Hislop is a bit snotty about blogs and the internet, but among bloggers there is great respect for the magazine’s ability to spotlight hypocrisy and corruption in an amusing manner, and for its aggressive stand against the absurdities of UK libel law. This, then, is something of a kick in the teeth.

There is evidence that Macqueen has sympathies with Dale and with Staines, whose own blog until recently carried comments accusing Tim of supposed secret political links. Tim complained about these claims, as well as Dale’s, to MessageSpace, an ad service which is used by a number of conservative bloggers, including Dale – Staines is connected with it, and the Chief Information Officer is a certain Jag Singh. Although Staines has apparently now removed the offending comments, Tim’s complaint to MessageSpace was met with a joke homosexual advance from one of Singh’s minions.

The full account can be read here.

UPDATE: Since the above, Dale has been waving lawyers at Tim, complaining of “harrassment” and (inevitably) making a vague accusation of libel. Dale has also told his readers (while attempting to appear non-boastful about it) about a recent Private Eye lunch he attended:

It was good to see Adam Macqueen again. He worked for me briefly (don’t they all?!) at Politico’s many moons ago and is now one of the Eye’s main journalists. He is also writing a history of the magazine to mark its 50th anniversary, and blogs HERE. An all round good guy.

The lads all stick together, eh?

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A bit more on Jason “Molotov” Mitchell, whom I blogged on a couple of days ago: it turns out that when he’s not eating Muhammad cookies on TV or promoting crank conspiracies about Barack Obama, his “Illuminati Films” knocks out promotional videos for Campus Harvest. This evangelical organisation was founded by Pastor Ron Lewis, who is based at King’s Park International Church in Durham, NC. I blogged on this particular church in 2005; it is part of the controverisal “Every Nation” grouping of neo-Pentecostal churches. Molotov’s father Wayne Mitchell was the previous pastor; further details have been added to my previous blog entry on the subject.

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Seismic Shock carries a guest article about the BNP’s Rev Robert West, highlighting my blog entries about his recent appearance in the pulpit at a village Baptist chapel. The chapel is part of the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches (FIEC), which in turn is part of a grouping called Affinity. I tried to get the FIEC (which has website banner suggesting support for a multi-racial society) to make a public statement about the incident, without success. Others, however, have apparently had more luck:

British Messianic Jews had expressed grave anxiety over the FIEC’s slow response, first blogged by Bartholomew, to the BNP priest’s meeting at an FIEC church. However one concerned Messianic Jew was told that the “FIEC is entirely opposed to any BNP spokesman or representative being used to forward their cause in our churches.” Messianic Jews would say of BNP support of Israel, with friends like these who needs enemies!

Well, that’s a nice start, although it is still nothing more than a private statement made to a particular individual; there is nothing on the FIEC website.

The BNP decided to downplay anti-Semitism for strategic reasons several years ago; Nick Griffin (author of an anti-Jewish pamphlet called Who Are the Mind-Benders?) realised that attacking Muslims was more likely to yield results, and he is quoted as having said that “The proper enemy to any political movement isn’t necessarily the most evil and the worst. The proper enemy is the one we can most easily defeat.” Jewish groups, however, remain unimpressed.

Rev West was interviewed at home on the East Midlands local edition of the BBC Politics Show a few weeks ago (I also made a brief contribution); behind his chair he had been careful to place both an Israeli flag and a British flag. West showed the camera a certificate dating from the 1970s which confirmed his association with a Welsh Pentecostal denomination called the Apostolic Church; the certificate had been signed by Omri Bowen, who was a theologian within the group. The Apostolic Church made a private statement to a blogger repudiating West’s views a while ago; however, as with the FIEC, there has been no formal or public statement on the subject.

(Name vars.: Omri C. Bowen; O. C. Bowen)

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The Nigeria This Day has the latest from evangelist Helen Ukpabio, who has endured global opprobrium since a British television documentary suggested in November that her campaign against child witches had led to children being abused in the Nigerian state of Akwa Ibom. Her film End of the Wicked was named as having contributed to the hysteria. However:

“There was no place in the film where children were branded witches rather, we saw greedy children initiated into witchcraft by other children who were witches in the school,” Ukpabio explained.

She’s taken this line before, as I blogged here, but it remains an incoherent objection. We’re also told that Ukpabio:

• is suing Channel 4 and the documentary’s narrator, the actress Sophie Okonedo (mis-spelt as “Sophie Okowedo”).
• has complained to OFCOM, the British television regulator, about the programme.
• has demanded that a home for children stigmatized as witches be shut down as a “419” and its operators – Gary Foxcroft (mis-spelt as “Gary Fox Croft”) and Sam Ikpe-Itauma (mis-spelt as “Sam Ikpe-Itauman”) be arrested. She has previously suggested that Ikpe-Itauma is a “wizard”.

She also makes the claim that End of the Wicked is actually “radically different from the pirated film wherein our ministries was wickedly libeled  thereof”.

I’ve blogged on Ukpabio a few times in the past; feedback from her supporters and family includes the suggestions that I am a “cyber murderer”, as well as being “wicked, crooked, crafty, poisonous, and dangerous to women in general”.

(Hat tip: Bulldada Newsblog)

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Terry Krepel draws attention to the antics of WorldNetDaily video columnist Jason “Molotov” Mitchell, whose latest diatribe takes the usual groan-inducing line that Obama is actually…a Nazi.

Krepel notes:

More about Molotov Mitchell: His real name is Jason, he has produced a number of inaccurate, smear-laden anti-Obama videos (including an embrace of the Obama birth certificate conspiracy), and  he’s a part of something called the Zealot Movement, an extremist Christian movement built on the straight-edge punk lifestyle that, according to Mitchell, “avoid[s] the putfalls of American, effeminised Christianity” and embraces “sexual purity through the practice of abstinence until marriage and the abolition of homosexuality.”

Mitchell was also behind “Flamethrower TV”, a show which received some attention last year when he made and ate a cookie bearing a cartoon face of Muhammad, to the delight of WND‘s Joe Kovaks.

The “straight-edge punk lifestyle” has been around for a long time, and it combines punk music with a puritanical rejection of alcohol and drugs. Mitchell’s “Zealot Movement” adds a layer of Christian dominionism:

A limited world view combined with a misplaced desire for tradition has caused the Church to be splintered into a thousand factions, all claiming to be keepers of the “true Faith.” Now we stand in the wake of schoolyard massacres, no-fault divorces and infant genocide with nothing to offer but dead tradition and books about the rapture.

In other words, rather than wait for the “rapture” to take Christians into heaven, Christians need to take charge here and now:

…We are children of the Sword, the face of Truth on a dying planet.  We are the worldwide tribe and at the feet of our King the nations will bow.  We are the pure and royal priesthood.  All that we put our hands to must prosper.  We are servants to man, relentless in our toil, driven by love of the Greatest Servant.  We are the Brotherhood of Christ.  Our family does not break like those of the fallen world.  We are the enemies of injustice and defenders of those without defense.  Our eyes are the coals of righteousness and our hearts burn with hatred for all that is evil.  We are the warriors.  We are the fearless.  We are the Zealots.

That’s from a Xanga website belonging the “Zealot Leader“; no name is given, but there is a photo of a bared tattooed torso which appears to belong to Mitchell. The same material appeared on a “Zealot Movement” website in 2001 that is no longer active. This Zealot Movement website also carried a quote attributed in the Bible to King Jehu, “Come with me and see my zeal for the LORD”; that’s in 2 Kings 10:16, and the way that Jehu demonstrates his “zeal” in the following verses is by killing the family of Ahab and then massacring the followers of Baal.

Mitchell gives some background to his philsophy in an interview here:

Straight Edge made me feel great physically, and cleared my mind of the drug-induced haze of my teen years, but when that happened, I realised that that was the end of the ride. My body was whole, but my spirit was sick. Straight Edge couldn’t help me when I wondered why I was here; straight edge was great for my body, but useless for my soul. I faced that, deep down, and began to study religions with the new clarity straight edge had given my mind. I studied Buddhism, Islam, and Mormonism. I came very close to becoming a Hare Krishna follower, before finding many glaring inconsistencies in the Vedic texts and their hierarchy of gods and demigods. Ultimately, I began to read the Bible as much as I hated the idea of reading the Western world’s propaganda, when I stumbled upon a Scripture that intrigued me. “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” (John 14:6) Now, most world religions can all hold hands and say, “we all serve the same God; we just do it in different ways,” but this quote from the Man all religions credit as divine and the greatest of teachers was a shockwave for me to read. I thought it was profoundly arrogant, at first, but then I considered the possibility that he could be right. If that was so, then I was in trouble, and so was just about everyone else. C.S. Lewis made a powerful suggestion that Jesus could only be a Liar, Lunatic or Lord. So I began to study the life of Jesus against the lives of the other prophets, the accounts of Josephus, the archaeological evidence behind Scripture, etc. and ultimately saw that there was no other option-Jesus was indeed, Lord.

The Zealot Movement was a natural progression from there on out. Anyone serious about the Christian religion will avoid the pitfalls of American, effeminised Christianity, and join a serious movement. The Zealots are one of the best, compromising nothing and obeying Scripture as Law, the same as the Early Church Fathers did.

…Go to Barnes and Noble, buy a cheap Bible and read it. Even if you hate the idea of Christianity, like I did, you’ll never change America until you’ve studied the Judeo-Christian foundations of the “last world power.” If you want to make more money, find out why the money has “In God We Trust” on it. Turn off the TV and read that Bible with an open mind. Pretty soon, you’ll see things you’ve never seen before.

Mitchell also dislikes Wiccans and pagans, whom he also accuses – with thudding inevitability – of being Nazis; as he explains back on the Xanga site:

The occult and paganism are indeed separate entities with different theologies, practices, etc.  but only as much as Hitler’s S.S. and the German regulars were separate.  Semantics.  They’re both antichristian in their belief system, which is to say that they both oppose the very foundation of Western civilization and submission to spiritual authority.  Goddesses and earthen worship, Lucifer and hedonism, it’s all in the same category- “do as thou wilt.”  And the deeper you dig, the more ugly connections you will find, between Norse mythology and wicka, earth worship and survival of the fittest, ultimately culminating in what Hitler called “a brave religion founded in the worship of Nature and not the effeminate pity ethic of the Jew Christ.”  Call it what you will, humanism, hedonism, wicka, Odinism, race supremacy, the Occult- only one base principle dictates their doctrines- “Do as thou wilt.”

Christian Zealotry stands apart with its theology being based in “Not my will, but Thine be done.”  Sacrifice and giving vs. survival and self-gratification.  If you want to plod along like sheep, following nothing but your lust, then join the Occult, the wickens, the Nazi Party, or just don’t even think about spiritual life and responsibility at all.  But if you want to follow the higher path that most will never dare to tread, the Way of Love, the Royal Priesthood, the Eternal Brotherhood, then submission to Christ is your Destiny.

“Black Metal” also gets the thumbs-down; returning to the interview:

Black metal represents liberalism’s logical destiny. The black metal practitioner and the ACLU both hate the concepts of the moral majority, the Ten Commandments on a court house, prayer in school, and anything else that would dare suggest absolute Truth, but the black metal-head has the spine to carry his beliefs out to their logical end, and openly attack. They all subscribe to Nietchzeian philosophy, the ACLU, NOW, the homosexual community, the black metal scene, and they are all out for the same thing: the total annihilation of Christian law, as it is the only obstacle they can not seem to surmount.

In 2005 Mitchell’s “Illuminati Films” made a documentary on musical subcultures, entitled Dark Planet: Visions of America. A 2007 review in Black Oak Presents by Robert Benson (p.11 of this pdf) calls the film “imformative and imaginatively compiled”, but he complains that it “grossly exaggerated” the cultural significance of these groups and has “many fatal flaws”. In particular, he complains that the “zealot” segment, in which Mitchell’s wife “DJ Dolce” is interviewed, is biased to show members as “happy and charitable”, and that the skinhead segment dismisses the reality of  a “white power” grouping. The black metal segment, meanwhile, “spouted the usual rhetoric about Satanism in American society”.

In February, Mitchell treated WND readers to a particuarly bizarre piece in which he mocks liberals for believing in evolution so that they can avoid moral responsibility, but being inconsistent because they don’t follow the logic of “survival of the fittest”, which should mean support for capitalism, militant Islam, and discouraging homosexuality; the larger point he is attempting to make, if there is one, remains obscure to me.

UPDATE: A reader draws my attention to another interesting connection. According to this profile:

Mitchell’s parents divorced when he was five, and his father, an evangelical pastor who now heads the Beacon City Church in Boston, raised him. “I was a troubled adolescent, an angry young man who was always fighting and drinking,” he told me. “Dad kicked me out when I was seventeen, which was one of the best things that ever happened to me.” He became interested in the punk scene and spent a year, by choice, living on the street, which is where he discovered God. After reading the Book of Mormon and the Koran, and nearly becoming a Hare Krishna, Mitchell turned to Christianity. “No light came down, but it was the beginning of a transformation,” he said.

The pastor father is Wayne Mitchell, and Beacon City Church is part of the Every Nation grouping of churches; I have blogged on this controversial neo-Pentecostal group  – which has its origins in the 1980s “Maranatha” movement – a number of times in the past. Wayne Mitchell formerly pastored King’s Park International Church, which I wrote about in 2005, and which is currently pastored by Ron Lewis. A poster to a critical web forum concerning Every Nation noted in 2007 that

Ron Lewis has a new website: www.ronlewisministries.com

I noticed on the media page that there are several videos produced by Illuminati Pictures, an independent film company based in Durham that appears to have ties to KPIC. They also produced Campus Harvest’s new promo video that’s just been posted to You Tube.

Campus Harvest  was founded by Lewis, and one Campus Harvest video featuring Jason Mitchell can be seen here. One wonders whether Ron Lewis or Wayne Mitchell have any views about “Molotov”‘s methods of telling the world the message of Christ.

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