Bartholomew's Notes

A few weeks ago I blogged on the dispute between Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens and David Miller of Spinwatch. Meleagrou-Hitchens’ complaints about the site included reference to an Israeli terrorism researcher named Sagit Yehoshua:

I have recently spoken to the other individual mentioned in [David] Miller’s piece, Sagit Yehoshua, who earlier this year requested that her profile be removed from SpinProfiles. She informed me that as well as being riddled with inaccuracies about her associations, the original profile also made a very clear, and totally unfounded, suggestion that she is a member of Israeli intelligence. (The existing profile has been revised, but still makes an insinuating allusion.)

Miller has now responded to both elements of this objection, and he tells us that Yehoshua has been in contact with Spinwatch‘s ISP in an attempt to have the site about her removed. He also clarifies that the supposed “inaccuracies about her associations” concern her alleged links to a group called “the Cheerleaders”:

As we noted above, the correspondence with our ISP has involved both Sagit Yehoshua and her adviser, who introduced himself as representing Yehoshua as a ‘client’. This was someone signing himself ‘Matt’ from an organization called ‘P-Group’. We asked our ISP to ascertain whther P-Group were lawyers and to confirm with Sagit Yehoshua whether they, in fact, acted for her. She confirmed that P-Group are not lawyers, but do ‘internet security advice’. The email from the advisers had come from a hotmail account: p-group AT hotmail.co.uk and not from any business related domain name and ‘Matt’ did not give a surname.

So what are Sagit Yehoshua’s connections with the Cheerleaders? Although she had her name removed as an officer of the Facebook group in February 2010, Sagit Yehoshua remains (last checked 6 August) a member of the Cheerleadered group on Facebook. But the more compelling clue that she is connected to them is that she has confirmed that ‘P-Group’ are acting for her in her current complaint. ‘P-Group’, appears not to be a real entity either. However it does seem to have featured in the communications of the Cheerleaders in the past.

I’ve written about the “Cheerleaders” a number of times over the past 18 months or so: they are a group of cyber-vigilantes who purport to research and oppose Islamic extremists, although they are actually more interested in using fake on-line identities and sock-puppets to harass people. Most notably, last year they used Twitter to publicise thr blogger Tim Ireland’s home address and to send him a series of threatening messages – such as “machete to your throat” – in the stated hope that he would be forced to “go back to Australia”. This was prompted by Tim’s blog posts on how a man named Dominic Wightman had tried to manipulate him (and me) into writing blog posts attacking another man against whom Wightman has a grudge. However, Charlie Flowers, who heads the “Cheerleaders”, claims that this was simply coincidental, and that the attacks on Tim were undertaken because of Tim’s opposition to Nadine Dorries MP (see here). Wightman in turn has also disavowed any association, although Flowers did work with Wightman’s defunct “VIGIL Network”, along with Glen Jenvey.

A Facebook page for the “Cheerleaders” has around 500 members, but most of those are either casual invitees or people with whom Flowers has insinuated himself over the past few months. Those actively involved in the harassment created a plethora of on-line pseudonyms on Facebook and other sites, although most of these have been deleted or deactivated in the past few months. We know that Charlie Flowers is the prime mover, and that also involved is a man named Matthew Edwards and an unidentified woman, who made a taunting video. The core may be just those three; Flowers has actively attempted to give the impression that some his female friends are involved when they are not really.

The messages to Spinwatch from “Matt” appear to have come from Matthew Edwards: “P-Group” appears on the “Fighting Cocks” Myspace page as a supposed car hire firm called “P-Group Car Services”, with a mobile phone number but no address. The “p-group AT hotmail.co.uk” email address is also given as the contact address for the “Fighting Cocks” band. I’ve had several emails from “P-Group” myself, such as this:

From: matthew edwards XXXXXXXX@XXXXXXX.XX.XX

Date: 15 September 2009 22:38

Subject:

Dear Richard;
Seeing as I know all parties on our side, may I offer to mediate in a sit-down between yourself, Dominic and Matyi?…

Yours Sincerely
Mr Rivers
P-Group

“Matyi” is one of Flowers’ stage names, and Edwards has used the “Mr Rivers” name elsewhere. There was also a goading comment to my blog, received on 27 September 2009:

Barty.
Look here…

http://www.youtube.com/user/Pikeymassiv

Mr Rivers

This YouTube channel – since deleted – was created specifically to publicise Tim Ireland’s home address. Some of the messages received from Edwards came from an IP which matched the IP for messages from Charlie Flowers. In early October, I received a further message, mentioning “Charlie and Matt from P-Group”.

Tim also received the following email in January, in which Flowers, using his “Matyi” identity, uses “P-Group” to try to intimidate Tim into not writing about his associations:

I TOLD you not to contact these people. But your mental condition meant you had to, didn’t it? OK you are now officially in the crap, P-Group has found your web host, and they have been notified.
You have a choice:
1. Walk away and look away, and NEVER contact anyone involved with us again.
2. Keep it up, and reap the whirlwind.
3. This means and includes: anyone at Kooba or Redwire.

Matyi
TFC Cheerleaders

I received a similarly thuggish threat a couple of weeks later, that the Cheerleaders “laugh at legal and police business” and that they would “mess” me “up” if I continued to write about them.

Of course, I’m sure that Yehoshua knows nothing about any of this, or has been fobbed off with a bogus explanation: when it suits him, Flowers can come across as good humoured, and he is knowledgeable about various aspects of Islam and South Asian pop culture. Although he associates with elements of the English Defence League, he is not anti-Muslim. I have been given to understand that several people have disassociated themselves from him after discovering his on-line activities and his attempts to implicate them in his behaviour (this may explain why gigs involving his band have been cancelled).  He has also sought to play down his on-line harassment of Tim as he has built up new associations with groups such as British Muslims for Secular Democracy, and when challenged on the subject he’s not above an outright lie: when I last brought up the subject of one of the worst harassing pseudonyms (“Shooter Hadchiti”), he simply declared that I had made it all up.

If Spinwatch has misrepresented Yehoshua’s associations by mentioning the Cheerleaders, the fault lies with two men who have made a concerted effort to give the impression of a meaningful link: Charlie Flowers and Matthew Edwards.

UPDATE: I should add that several months ago I received a series of emails from someone calling himself “Kelvin”, who claimed to know all sorts of information about “P-Group”, including the supposed detail that it was founded by “ex-military and forensic-background people in 2006 to provide specialist intelligence for media”, and that “Matt Edwards” is a pseudonym for Ed Rivers rather than the other way around (a suggestion I know for certain is not true). “Kelvin”, of course, was an elusive character without a resolvable IP, and it was obvious that this was Edwards and Flowers trying to suck me into their Walter Mitty world for whatever reason. So, Yehoshua wants to insist on her independence from intelligence agencies, yet her “advisors” contact me with stupid messages under a fake name trying to convince me that “P-Group” is an intelligence outfit. If I were Yehoshua, I’d be asking Edwards and Flowers for an explanation.

UPDATE: Flowers has since boasted – in a characteristic bit of vicarious bravado – that Edwards is “ex-forces”. It seems to me likely that the name “P-Group” is probably meant to allude to the “15 (UK) Psychological Operations Group”, also known as the “15 PSYOPS Group“, based at the Defence Intelligence and Security Centre in Chicksands. Perhaps Edwards really has had some association with this military organisation, but his antics are a poor thrill-seeking parody of what the 15 PSYOPS Group actually stands for. If I were a member of PSYOPS I’d be less than impressed with this foolish appropriation of the organisation’s name; and if I were Yehoshua, I’d be noting this as further evidence of manipulation and betrayal.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 7 Comments »

Must be true, I saw it on teh interwebs.

And:

Plus from March last year:

At some point Fox amended  the top story to “Advocates of Anti-Shariah Measures Alarmed by Judge’s Ruling”. Kagan, of course, is also a Nazi, because she once quoted a 1905 book by a man who later became a Nazi.

(H/T to Little Green Footballs for Breitbart article)

Filed under: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

The latest from Pamela Geller:

Notice how [Daisy Khan] no longer calls it  “Cordoba Initiative” but park51 — now that we know that Cordoba is symbolic of Islamic conquest over the West… In the book Anti-Semitism: myth and hate from antiquity to the present, Frederick Schweitzer and Marvin Perry point out that the rosy view of Muslim Spain has been used since 1948 as “an Arab-Islamist weapon in what is primarily an ideological and political struggle against Israel.” This misuse of history ignores “a catalog of lesser-known hatred and massacres,” including the pogroms in Cordoba in 1011 and Granada in 1066 — both perpetrated by Muslims.

“An Iberian and Roman city in ancient times, in the Middle Ages it was capital of the Islamic caliphate which conquered and occupied Spain for nearly 800 years. During this time Cordoba was one of the largest cities in the world whose name continues to represent a symbol of Islamic conquest to many faithful Muslims around the world.”

Clearly, Geller is implying that the indented quote has come from the Schweitzer and Perry book – but there’s no sign of it in the Amazon book search function, and it does not reflect the book’s main concern. The quote has, though, been spammed around various web-discussions in recent weeks, with several sites giving Wikipedia as the source.

Geller’s use of Schweitzer and Perry is also a vulgar misappropriation. Their discussion of Cordoba (p. 267) is derived from Bernard Lewis, who indeed suggests that Cordoba as a “golden age” of inter-religious harmony is a “myth” which has been used polemically in the context of modern Israel – but Lewis also tells us that this simplification was created by nineteenth-century Jewish historians as “a reproach to Christians”.

We know that the idea of “Cordoba” is used by Muslims to evoke the notion of a harmonious Islam – the fact that the ideal may not reflect the historical reality does not therefore indicate that the word is being used in bad faith. If there is any evidence of another meaning – a symbolic meaning of “Islamic conquest over the West” – then why doesn’t Geller point us to a proper source, rather than dressing up Wikipedia as scholarship? Are there any Arabic sayings which point to such a meaning? Literary references? Sermons? Of course,  Al-Qaeda and various Islamist groups sometimes mention “Al Andalus”, but there’s no indication that it is has a wider symbolic resonance.

Geller is shameless in her lies and misrepresentations – I recently noted her claim that Elena Kagan is actually a Nazi.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 42 Comments »

According to Amazon, yesterday was the publication date of Islam is of the Devil, published by Creation House and written by Pastor Terry D. Jones of the Dove World Outrearch Center in Florida. As with Fred Phelps, Jones has a particular obsession with one subject, which he has distilled into a slogan to attract media interest: there have been various controversies over his “Islam is of the Devil” church sign and t-shirts (the t-shirts also appeared at a rally for Rifqa Bary), and Jones recently announced “International Burn a Koran Day” for 11 September; the Gainesville Sun notes that

Last week, the church’s senior pastor, Terry Jones, was interviewed by CNN’s Rick Sanchez, and news organizations across the world — from The Times of India to The Guardian in England — have made mention of Dove World’s plans.

A number of evangelical leaders have denounced the planned stunt; Richard Land of the Southern Baptists called it “appalling, disgusting, and brainless”.

However, while Phelps is confined to the fringes of fundamentalism, Jones is better-connected: Creation House is one of the biggest conservative Christian publishing houses in the USA, and it is an imprint of Strang Communications, which publishes Charisma magazine. Stephen Strang, who heads the company, has featured on this blog previously – I noted his links to John Hagee here. In 2005, Time named him as one of the “25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America”.

But is Creation House now embarrassed by the association with Jones? Mention of the book on the company’s website is confined to a small entry in a pdf catalogue, and an associated Creation  House Facebook page has recently deleted several messages from one of Jones’ fellow pastors at Dove, Wayne Sapp:

Wayne Sapp Islam is of the Devil, will show you: Why Islam is not a religion of peace, but of violence; How the political history of Islam can demonstrate what will happen in the future if it is allowed to flourish; MOST IMPORTANTLY, what you can do to take a stand for the truth and engage in spiritual battle to reclaim nations from the grips of Islam.

June 18 at 10:51am

Wayne Sapp Dove World Outreach Center, on Monday, July 5th, 2010 will protest the Islamic Center of Gainesville, Florida. For more information contact, info@doveworld.org.

June 16 at 9:17am

Wayne Sapp Creation House is releasing the book Islam is of the Devil, written by Dr. Terry Jones, on July 6!!!!! This book reveals the radical steps that are necessary to erradicate Islam! The book is available on Amazon, Christian Book Distributors, and Barnes & Noble

June 16 at 9:11am

Another Sapp has also posted a review of the book on Amazon:

Islam is of the devil!, July 24, 2010 By  Marvin Wayne Sapp

This review is from: Islam Is of the Devil (Hardcover)
Great book! I have read it several times already and will read it again and again. The truth about Islam is revealed in this book without all the hype.

(Wayne Sapp explains how to burn a Koran here)

Jones’ book also features a foreword by Jack Coe, son a prominent Pentecostal evangelist and faith-healer of the same name who was active in the 1950s.

Dove was profiled by the Gainesville Sun last July, including critical comments from ex-members (including Jones’ daughter) who claim the church is abusive:

…Entwined with the church’s message is a theme stressing obedience to senior pastors and work for the kingdom of God – a theme that persuaded one couple from Germany to work full time and uncompensated for Terry and Sylvia Jones’ business, TS and Company. The business sells vintage furniture on eBay.

Outside contact, even with family for weddings and funerals, is prohibited for students who attend the Dove World Outreach Academy in Gainesville. The academy members live on property owned by TS and Company, work in the selling, packing and shipping of furniture and are unpaid.

Terry Jones’ daughter, Emma Jones, who still lives in Cologne after breaking with her parents and the church, said TS and Company, which first was established in Germany in 2004 by Terry and Sylvia Jones, fed the private coffers of her father and stepmother in Cologne.

The paper has also made public the DWOC Academy’s authoritarian and semi-literate rulebook.

Jones and Sapp are not complete monomaniacs on Islam, though: the DWOC has also found time to organise a “No Homo Mayor” protest against Gainesville’s gay mayor, and Jones also rails against Obama, who is unqualified to be president and only got the job because he’s black.

In Germany, Jones founded the Christliche Gemeinde Köln (Colonge Christian Church, also known as the “Evangelical Christian Church”) in 1983; he became the leader of DWOC in 2007, although he had long-standing links with DWOC’s founder, Donald Northrup. According to a memoir by Northrup’s widow Dolores (who has a website here, and whose book is on Google Books), both Northrup and Jones were involved with Maranatha Ministries; this was a controversial Charismatic organisation which was accused of authoritarianism and abuse in the 1980s before eventually collapsing in 1989. Maranatha decided to establish its HQ in Gainesville, and Dolores writes that she and her husband came to the town at Maranatha’s request. Jones, meanwhile, was sent to Germany to create a Maranatha branch there. According to this report, Dolores (although she is named as “Elsie”) left the church in 2009, “over concerns about where the congregation was headed”.

I wrote several blog entries on Maranatha a few years ago, in particular in relation to a neo-Pentecostal grouping called Every Nation (e.g. here, here, and here). Also involved with Maranatha in the 1980s – and based in Gainesville – was Lee Grady, who is close to Stephen Strang and who edits his Charisma magazine.

A Ship of Fools “mystery worshipper” visited the German church in 2006 and gives some background:

Services are translated into several languages (English, French, Bulgarian, Russian and Portugese) and as a result the nations do come! The members hail from all over Köln. There are lots of young people, but also some oldies. They conduct a successful ministry to the poor, and quite a few beneficiaries of this ministry have joined the church. It is a cell church, with 39 cells (they call them apostolic teams) in Köln and the surrounding cities. With around 400 members, it is the largest non-Catholic church in the Köln/Bonn metropolitan area.

The church has been controversial in Germany; this CBN news report (no date given) claims it has suffered persecution, and in 1997 Jones sumitted a written statement to a “Hearing on Religious Intolerance in Europe Today”, held before the UC Congress Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (H/T Rachel Tabachnick). However, according to the 1999 U.S. Department of State Annual Report on International Religious Freedom:

According to the Christian Community in Cologne (CCK), no incidents of harassment, discrimination, or death threats have been directed at CCK members since 1992, with the exception of occasional letters from a particular individual, whom they describe as harmless. CCK representatives claimed that the Church’s current tax difficulties were due to harassment by local tax authorities. However, they admitted that the Church’s tax problem was based on errors made by the Church, although they questioned the motivation of the authorities for scrutinizing the Church’s 1992 application for extension of tax-exempt status (which must be renewed every few years, depending on state law). The fact that the Church apparently violated tax law, and the authorities’ voluntary reduction of the Church’s tax liability, raise questions about the merit of the CCK’s allegations of harassment.

UPDATE: Details of DWOC’s joint protest with Phelp’s Westboro Baptist Church in April can be seen here.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 21 Comments »

From the Columbus Dispatch:

Christian convert Rifqa Bary is refusing chemotherapy for cancer because she believes that she was cured at a faith-healing event, according to a motion in Franklin County Juvenile Court.

Rifqa was to undergo a year of chemotherapy after her cancer was surgically removed, the document filed by her parents states. But Rifqa, who is in foster care, was taken to a faith-healing event in Youngstown a couple of weeks ago by Franklin County Children Services, without her parents’ consent, according to the document.

…It’s unclear whether she is cancer-free at the moment. The Barys’ attorney, Omar Tarazi, said in a motion that Rifqa will need a hysterectomy if the cancer returns.

The Barys want to force chemotherapy and are concerned that their daughter could die without treatment, Tarazi wrote.

Bary’s illness was announced when she was hospitalized in May; her Muslim parents’ concern was vilified by the likes of Pamela Geller as an attempt to sabotage her treatment. As I noted at the time, the neo-Pentecostal pastors around Bary have been telling her that she has a special prophetic role to play in the world, and that God has given her supernatural powers of healing. According to Charisma:

[Jamal] Jivanjee said Bary believes God has a plan for her and that she will be healed. “But she felt like she needed people to be aware and praying for her,” he told Charisma

Jivanjee announced Bary’s illness on Facebook, although from a comment left on this blog it seems that another pastor close to Bary, Brian Williams, disagreed with his decision to do so. However, Williams also followed Jivanjee’s posting with the claim that Bary had been healed. Various posters have left messages for Jivanjee on Facebook asking for an update on her health – Jivanjee has not responded to those requests, although in May he told Geller that “Chemotherapy treatments are expected in the near future”.

Bary’s lawyers are seeking to normalise her immigration status as she approaches her eighteenth birthday next week. Continued access to medical services has been given as one reason why this is urgent.

UPDATE: The AP has an update. The judge has declined to enforce medical treatment without consent; also:

A letter from Bary’s doctor recommending the 45 weeks of chemotherapy indicates she is cancer free for now according to available imaging technology, Bary’s attorney, Kort Gatterdam, told the judge.

…Rifqa Bary stopped the treatment after becoming sick and in consultation with her doctor, Gatterdam said. He disputed the faith healer allegation, saying Bary had attended a prayer conference after which she continued with surgeries and other treatment.

“Rifqa’s not saying she’ll never do the treatment again, that she’ll never do chemo,” Gatterdam said. “She’ll continue working with her doctor.”

Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Here’s an interesting pattern. Back in September 2009, Tim Ireland asked Patrick Mercer to clarify the extent to which his office had worked with Glen Jenvey, part-responsible for last year’s bogus “Terror Target Sugar” story and other dubious tabloid scare stories. Tim noted:

Meanwhile, Mercer is telling people who are asking questions about this that I am an “electronic stalker”.

Move forward to summer 2010, and Mercer is enduring some bad publicity over an extra-marital affair and some money he is alleged to owe his ex-lover. His response? Mail diarist Richard Kay reports:

Tory MP Patrick Mercer tells me he has been issued with a personal alarm system by the police to help him avoid any unwelcome approaches by his thwarted ex-lover, Commons secretary Sarah Coyle.

…While the dust settles, Mercer is off to Afghanistan to research his third novel… ‘I think I’ll be safer in Helmand Province than here,’ he quips.

That would be the same Patrick Mercer MP who has been known to opine about our “our overstretched police and security services”.

Mercer’s affair became public knowledge after Coyle berated him in a corridor at their shared workplace, but there are no reports that she has been acting in a way that would necessitate the ex-soldier running to the police for an alarm system. And if there is a genuine Fatal Attraction-type reason for him to have such a thing, he should surely feel some remorse for his part in reducing someone to such a state and either discuss the matter with due seriousness or – better – not at all. A suggestive quip to a diarist simply leaves the impression that he is playing the media to smear (and damage the career of) a woman he’s already let down.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 8 Comments »

Charisma reports on Pastor John Hagee’s latest Christians United for Israel (CUFI) Washington Summit:

Participants said one of the most moving aspects of the summit was an art exhibit remembering the Holocaust created by students from the K-12 Christian school run by Word of Faith Fellowship in Spindale, N.C. The poignant paintings, drawings and sculptures captured not only the horror of the Holocaust but also the hope of Israel’s restoration, [CUFI Executive Director David] Brog said…

“What they produced is simply amazing,” Brog said. “Even students who have never really been artists [and] know very little about art produced such stunning works, works that reveal such a love of the Jewish people and such an appreciation of the horrors of the Holocaust and such a celebration of the renewal of Israel. Everyone who went there, including Holocaust survivors, were deeply, deeply touched.”

The exhibition also featured at a CUFI event in Charlotte last year.

Word of Faith’s website includes a section on its “Holocaust Project” and an associated “Museum“. The church has a whole team of pastors, although the most senior are Sam and Jane Whaley; in relation to the Charlotte event, CUFI in particular thanked

Leigh Valentine for bringing the Holocaust expressions…

A 2006 report in the North Carolina Daily Courier has some interesting background:

Valentine’s name was first associated with the WOFF back in the mid­ 1990s when she was mar­ried to televangelist Robert Tilton. In February 1995, T­he D­aily C­ourier published its first set of stories about the practices of the controversial church some call a cult.

Valentine and Tilton are mentioned in one of the first stories. Tilton trav­eled to Spindale and cred­ited Sam and Jane Whaley with saving his life through a blasting, or demon exorcising, experi­ence.

Tilton had recently been discredited through a series of media reports questioning the legitimacy of his ministry. He and Valentine later when through a contentious divorce.

Tilton is now remembered for cheesy TV shows that are almost self-parodies of televangelism; clips are widely available on YouTube, although many of these have alas been edited by scoffers who have added flatulence sound effects to create a popular series known as “the Farting Preacher”. WOFF leadership were listed as creditors in a cosmetics business run by Valentine which failed in 2006, leading to the Courier report; Valentine does not appear to have given an impressive performance in the bankruptcy court.

As the name suggests, WOFF is related to Kenneth Hagin’s “Prosperity Gospel” Word Faith movement, and the Whaleys have links with the Swedish Prosperity Gospel megachurch Livets Ord (a church which I mentioned previously in a blog entry here). However, the notion of exorcism through “blasting” is Jane Whaley’s original idea – and it has led to serious controversy. The church was the subject of a journalistic exposé in 1995, a follow-up to which can be seen below; the technique involves shouting and screaming at people to force the demons to leave them, and it was alleged that young children were subjected to this treatment, and to corporal punishment.

Further bad publicity came as the result of child custody cases involving church members; a 2003 Courier report states that the DSS regarded the church as an “abusive environment”.

Jane Whaley was interviewed by sociologist Michael W. Cuneo for his book American Exorcism (2001); Whaley told him that everyone is afflicted by demons and requires multiple exorcisms, including herself. She also clarified that it was not a “screaming” ministry; rather, the emphasis is on “wailing, groaning, and travailing” (p. 235). Cuneo also notes that WOFF has anti-Catholic views;  John Hagee also has an anti-Catholic record, although when this became controversial he backed away from his stance.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 5 Comments »