Bartholomew's Notes

From Marisa Martin at WND:

…the Libyan terrorists et al, turned their sights on Eric Allen Bell and accused him of making the “The Innocence of Muslims,” knowing full well it was a complete lie.

…The filmmaker summed up the recent campaign against his life for WND.com: “I stand falsely accused of being the director of the hit YouTube Islamo-comedy, ‘The Innocence of Muslims.’ I did not make that film, nor do I know the people who did, but that hasn’t stopped over a hundred Muslims from sending me death threats… or Islamic terrorists from placing a bounty on my head.”

The article is entitled “Counter-Jihad Filmmaker will not be Silenced”, although the url suggests that this has been amended from “Anti-Muslim Filmmaker will not be Silenced”. Bell’s travails have apparently included a reward for his death, posted in Urdu on a Facebook page called “Enemies of Pakistan”, along with the accusation in English that he was one of the filmmakers.

A older article on Frontpage includes the detail that:

The threats came, said Bell, following a series of blog posts on the website The America Muslim. The writer, Sheila Musaji, denied any involvement in linking Bell to the film.

Despite her denial, Bell said that shortly after the posts appeared he received a number of threatening messages on his Facebook page.

Bell wrote his own piece for the same site in which he drew attention to two September articles by Musaji (here and here). The first of these two pieces also refers back to a an earlier article with some general background to the film; it included the following reference to Bell as part of a profile of Joseph Nasralla:

Joseph Nasralla Abdelmasih, an Egyptian American Coptic Christian, is the head of Media for Christ who produced the film.  He spoke at Pamela Geller & Robert Spencer’s hate group SIOA’s anti-mosque rally in 2010 (also attended by Morris Sadek) and at their Freedom Rally in 2011.  In June 2012, Geller and Spencer held what they variously called AFDI/SIOA Historic Human Rights Townhall or AFDI/SIOA “Summer Night for Human Rights”, and which I called an anti-Muslim hate fest.  Joseph Nasrallah and Eric Allen Bell attended this function which included many former Muslim speakers.  In her articles, Geller includes a photo of herself and Nasrallah, and a photo of Eric Allen Bell sitting in the audience.  He participated with Steve Klein and Gary Cass in an anti-Muslim student outreach effort titled 911 Defend Our Students.  Geller said about Nasralla: Joseph Nasralla spoke at our 911 Ground Zero mosque rallies. He is a champion of human rights.  SOURCES:  – ** –  ** – ** – ** – **

This was at a time when the media was scrambling for information about where the YouTube video had come from; Nasralla subsequently claimed that Nakoula had used the “Media for Christ” name without his “knowledge or permission”.

Musaji also noted the following:

I knew that in one of the profiles I had done for the Who’s Who in the Islamophobia/Arabophobia Industry, one of those individuals had mentioned planning a film about Prophet Muhammad.  It took me awhile, and then I remembered that the individual was Ali Sina who runs Faith Freedom Int’l, and is a board member of the hate group SIOA which was founded by Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer.

…In June 2012, Eric Allen Bell (who does have film experience) posted an article on Right Side News. 

Musaji then quotes Bell’s article, highlighting passages of interest:

I could not help but remember reading that Muslim Apostate, Ali Sina, had announced a few months earlier his plans to make a full length feature film, promising to depict the true story of Mohammed… When the article was published, I received a lot of emails telling me that I should speak to Ali Sina about his movie idea, given that I had made some films and spent most of my career in the entertainment industry. So Ali Sina and I spoke.  …  I said I admired his courage and felt very strongly that this was a movie that had to be made. But I added that there was probably no way he would ever get a theatrical release. Movie theaters would be afraid of the violent backlash. The life of Mohammed would have to be released on DVD or online – streaming on demand. The production would have to be financed privately and the movie shot in secret locations.

In fact, Ali Sina is planning a different polemical anti-Islam film, but the above hardly amounts to a conspiracy to falsely accuse Bell of being behind Innocence of Muslims. Given the murkiness around the whole “Sam Bacile” deception, it was reasonable to draw attention to public statements and associations such as the above. Musaji went on to add:

Eric Allen Bell posted a hateful anti-Muslim screed on his FaceBook page on 9/11 (which said nothing about the “Sam Basile” film).  Then, on September 14th, he posted an article on Front Page claiming that people wrongly connected his FaceBook post, and himself, with the unknown filmmaker who made the “Innocence of Muslims” film… I searched but could find only one blog post dated September 13th that mentioned Bell’s FB post, and that post simply countered the substance of Bell’s FB posting. I could find nothing anywhere about anyone claiming that Bell was the person responsible for the film.  On September 16th, The Guardian published an article America’s ‘counter-jihadis’ fan flames of hatred across Middle East which quoted Bell… He said he had nothing to do with “Innocence of Muslims”, but said he endorsed its’ message.  It would seem that the only identification of Bell with the filmmaker came from Bell’s own FaceBook fan page.

The Pakistani Facebook page shows that someone somewhere has indeed mistakenly linked Bell to the film, but that’s hardly Musaji’s fault and it is reasonable to wonder whether the threats he has received are primarily to do with his 9/11 article. Certainly, the claim in the WND article that “Libyan terrorists” have accused Bell doesn’t seem to be based on anything.

In a later piece, Musaji writes that Bell has also contacted her directly, accusing her of “placing my life in danger” and of a “cover up of numerous Islamic death threats”. She notes:

This truly is a delusional individual.  I have never claimed he was the filmmaker, never said that he made up death threats, never libeled or slandered him, never covered up any death threats. 

Finally:

 It seemed odd that Bell so regularly insinuated his name in discussions about making an anti-Muslim film.  Now, he has announced that he will use 300 hours of film that he already has as the base for a film to be called “American Infidel”.  He is requesting donations and says he only needs $200,000 to complete this film. 

According to the WND article, Bell “metamorphosed from a typical left-wing, Maoist acolyte into someone resembling Mel Gibson’s character in ‘The Patriot'” as a result of his researches into the building of the Murfreesboro mosque; it seems that likely that “Maoist acolyte” here is simply flesh-creeping rhetoric meant to denote a general liberalism rather than a specific far-left ideology.

The Guardian, meanwhile, describes Bell as

a one-time scourge of Islamophobia who changed sides after concluding Islam wished to subjugate the world…

However, there’s not a great deal of evidence that he engaged in serious debate with anti-Islam activists, although he did sometimes leave supportive comments on Loonwatch. According to a July article there:

During the time Bell was filming his documentary [in Murfreesboro] he used to constantly email us, asking us to publish his writings and advertise his documentary, his articles were usually so terrible that we declined. There was always something strange about Bell, and this strangeness manifested itself when Bell joined the ranks of the JihadWatch looniverse.

When Bell’s documentary failed to achieve the payback he had hoped for, (he expected to make money off of the venture, just like he does from his GlobalOne.tv site, a new-age spiritual mishmash with adverts from psychics) he turned to funding from the Islamophobia movement.

Bell in turn has accused Loonwatch of being a “Terrorist Spin Control Network“.

UPDATE: An exchange on Twitter:

?@EricAllenBell:
@Barthsnotes You should try getting your facts right before publishing an article where you know nothing of the topic. #tcot #tpp #gop #a4a (1)

@Barthsnotes:
@EricAllenBell As ever, the comments are open if you have anything you want to add. (2)

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Here’s a recent one I missed; from the Belarusian Telegraph Agency:

The visit of Patriarch Kirill to Belarus on 14 October will be dedicated to the 400th anniversary of the Kruptsy Icon of the Mother of God…

“The Patriarch will pay a visit to Belarus at the invitation of his Eminence, Metropolitan of Minsk and Slutsk Filaret, Patriarchal Exarch of all Belarus,” said the Exarchate.

Kruptsy is a former village which has since been absorbed into Minsk, and a “wonder-working” icon of the Virgin Mary appeared there in 1612. Details in English are scarce, although there is some information on this website. Other sites reference the “Krupetsky icon” and the “Krupetskii Mother of God”, while Google Maps names the area as “Vulica Krupcy” and the icon as the “Krupetskaja Icon”.

As well as visiting the church, Kirill opened a monument to his predecessor Alexey and met with President Lukashenko, dubbed “Europe’s Last Dictator“.

RIA Novosti has more on this last detail:

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko on Sunday awarded Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia the Order of Peoples’ Friendship.

…”This fully corresponds to the aspirations of the peoples of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine” he said. “You are a true friend of our country, and have proved this on numerous occasions, supporting us in the most difficult of situations.”

Lukashenko and the Patriarch have a long history of heaping praises on each other, and the tradition in fact stretches back to the Alexy years. In 2006, Patriarch Alexy praised the dictator’s support for “Christian enlightenment and moral health of society” and presented him with the Order of St. Sergius of Radonezh “for strengthening unity of Slav peoples”. In June 2007 the Patriarch returned the favour with the order of St Vladimir of the First Degree.

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Noam Chomsky and Helga Zepp-LaRouche among “key-note speakers”

Earlier this month saw the 10th “World Public Forum: Dialogue of Civilisations” conference take place on Rhodes. I’ve written about these international events previously: the WPF was initiated by the Center of the National Glory of Russia and the Saint Andrew the First-Called Foundation, and it was co-founded by Vladimir Yakunin, a confidant of Vladimir Putin who has been variously described as an “Orthodox Christian Chekist” and as “the Kremlin’s model Orthodox businessman“.

The yearly Dialogue of Civilisations events have featured a remarkably broad – and in some ways bizarre – range of high-level politicians, academics, and religious figures from around the world. This year, “key-note speakers” at the opening and closing meetings included, among others:

Noam Chomsky (USA) – Institute Professor and Professor (Emeritus) of Linguistics & Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) [apparently via web-link – RB]

Alfred Gusenbauer (Austria) – Co-chairman, World Public Forum “Dialogue of civilizations”, Federal Chancellor of Austria (2007-2008)

Walter Schwimmer (Austria) – Chairman, International Coordinating Committee, World Public Forum “Dialogue of Civilizations”

Fred Dallmayr (USA) – Co-Chairman, World Public Forum “Dialogue of Civilizations”; Packee J. Dee Professor, University of Notre Dame

Helga Zepp-LaRouche (Germany) – President, Schiller Institute

Siarhei Sidorski (Belarus) – Prime Minister of Belarus Republic (2003-2010), Minister of Industry and Agro-Based Industry, Eurasian Economic Commission

Zepp-LaRouche, of course, is the wife of the deeply unpleasant Lyndon LaRouche. She has written up an account of the event, for publication in LaRouche’s crackpot Executive Intelligence Review:

…A recurring theme was the utter collapse of moral values, the disappearance of any rules in the social order, and the consequent plunge into archaic and barbaric behavior. From different philosophical or religious standpoints, there was a demand for a renaissance toward the highest standards that are in accord with human dignity. Whether it was the ethical standard of the monks of Mount Athos, or the values of the Catholic Church, or the revival of Confucianism in China, the common denominator was the rejection of the cultural liberalization and decadence that are associated with globalization, and a return to the cultural roots of the different cultures and civilizations. Respect for the principle of equality of cultures and civilizations makes possible dialogue and mutual understanding.

This is similar to Yakunin’s own rhetoric; last year, Yakunin’s opening speech described “incompatibility between the neo-liberal interpretation of the system of human rights and the system of human values”, and he explained that “the universal urge to have the ‘freedom’ to say ‘anything and in any form’ has a temporary character and is beginning to fade away”. Thus criticism of human rights abuses in Russia can be deflected as western interference; as Yakunin stated recently in Der Spiegel:

What right does the West have to constantly criticize Russia? There are a few things about the West that I don’t like either. But I am not constantly pointing my finger and criticizing things that are a country’s internal affairs.

One particularly urgent topic of discussion at the conference was tensions with Iran; Zepp-LaRouche writes that:

The conference opened with a video by MIT Prof. Noam Chomsky, who warned of the immediate threat to the entire world from an escalation of the tension around Iran, and even the danger of nuclear war. Chomsky pointed out that Israel had recently received advanced submarines from Germany, from which nuclear-tipped missiles can be fired.

A presentation by Ghoncheh Tazmini criticised western approaches to Iran. However, there was perhaps rather less criticism of Iran’s own behaviour: the conference included a “salutation” from Mohammad Khatami, as well as greetings “on behalf of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran”.

Despite bemoaning the effects of American power in the world and showcasing the likes of Noam Chomsky, Yakunin also has links with American conservatives. Unsurprisingly, he regards “homosexual propaganda” as a “social pollutant”, and last summer he and his wife Natalia (President of the Sanctity of Motherhood Program) joined Don Feder and Larry Jacobs at a World Congress of Families event in Moscow. There are also unexpected overlaps between the WPF and organisations involving US Christian Right figures.

UPDATE: Here’s an odd piece of extra background information; from LaRouche’s website in 2009:

Vladimir Yakunin, the CEO of Russian Railways and a long-time associate of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, said in an October 16 interview with the Baltic Information Agency (BaltInfo), that American economist Lyndon LaRouche’s warnings of a systemic global crisis prepared him and his company for what has happened during the past three years.

…In February of this year, Yakunin took the same message to a conference at the London School of Economics, where he again named LaRouche as the “very rare” economist who predicted the collapse of the world financial bubble.

… LaRouche and his wife, Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche, were speakers at the 7th annual Rhodes Forum, held last week.

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Towards the end of September, Israel Shamir published an endorsement in Arabic by Bishop Atallah Hanna, written to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Shamir’s baptism by Hanna. The message refers to Shamir as “Adam Ermash”, and appears to describe him (via Google translate) as a “great Russian thinker and writer”. It goes on to list his publications, and to note their wide circulation. The message comes attached with a photograph of the two men, which Shamir states was taken “in the yard of the monastery in the Old City”.

Shamir has come to wide attention due to his association with Julian Assange and Wikileaks; he was profiled by Andrew Brown at the end of 2010:

WikiLeaks’s spokesperson and conduit in Russia has been exposed in the Swedish media as an anti-semite and Holocaust denier; his son, who represents the organisation in Sweden and is handing out stories to selected papers there, has been involved in an earlier scandal where a story he wrote about the supposed Israeli control of Swedish media was withdrawn after several of the people in it complained of being misquoted.

…The two men involved are Israel Shamir, a Jew who has converted to Orthodox Christianity and passionate antisemitism, and his son Johannes Wahlström. Shamir was listed as a co-author of a story in Counterpunch, which suggested that the woman who brought a complaint of rape against Julian Assange was a CIA plant.

As I’ve noted previously, Shamir is also known for his links with the authoritarian regime in Belarus; in December, Charter97 reported that he had met with Uladzimri Makei, Head of the Belarusian President’s Administration. There is a concern that Wikileaks cables concerning opposition groups may have been brought to the attention of the authorities.

At the end of last month there was controversy when the Morning Star republished a piece by Shamir which described Pussy Riot as a Western plot; the paper took the precaution of removing a sentence in which Shamir mentioned lack of free speech for “holocaust revisionists”. Also in September, Shamir decided to report from Cambodia, explaining that

The Pol Pot the Cambodians remember was not a tyrant, but a great patriot and nationalist, a lover of native culture and native way of life… As for the mass killings, these are just horror stories, averred my Cambodian interlocutors.

Shamir’s reasoning provoked a sarcastic response from the Phnom Penh Post:

We must admit we were swayed when Shamir provided conclusive proof that the KR genocides were either inept or out-and-out fabrications: he alerted us to the fact that the population of Cambodia has doubled since 1970. We eagerly await his next Counterpunch article, “Population of Europe has increased by a factor of six since 1939, therefore World War II never happened.”

Atallah Hanna, meanwhile, is the the highest-ranking Palestinian in the Orthodox church, and relations with the Greek Patriarch of Jerusalem, Theophilus, appear to be strained; in 2009 it was reported that:

Rivalry between Arab and Greek clergymen in the Orthodox Church has resurfaced following a decision by Patriarch Theophilus to dismiss a senior member of the Kingdom’s church court last week.

…Atallah said he was informed last Tuesday of the decision to dismiss him from his post as vice president of the Orthodox Church court in Amman.

…Atallah considers the dismissal as part of a series of decisions targeting Jordanian and Palestinian clergymen in the Greek Orthodox Church.

In 2007, Theophilus suspended salaries of Atallah, Archbishop Atallah Hanna and Archimandrite Milathius Basal after they took part in an Amman meeting that called for revoking recognition of the patriarch because he did not fulfil commitments he had pledged prior to his appointment, according to sources from the Amman-based Orthodox Society.

These unfulfilled “commitments” probably includes resolving the murky issue of church-owned land was sold to Israeli settlers in 2005.

As I’ve also written previously, Hanna is an articulate defender of Palestinian rights, and he is sometimes incorrectly described in reports as being an Archbishop (or even as the “Archbishop of Jerusalem”). However, there is reason to regard him with scepticism, even aside from the link to Israel Shamir: in 2003 (before he became bishop) reports appeared which quoted him as supporting suicide bombing, leading to censure from Theophilus’ (later ousted) predecessor, Irenaeus. Hanna complained that the accusations were part of a “crusade” against him by people close to the then-Patriarch, but given that the quotes appeared in sympathetic Arab and Muslim media outlets this explanation remains mysterious.

Atallah is also a supporter of the regime in Syria: while calling for “reform”, he also rails against “conspirators” who “want to destroy the brotherly relations between Muslims and Christians”.

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This one’s being reported widely; via CNN:

Shortly after Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney enjoyed cookies and soft drinks with the Rev. Billy Graham and his son Franklin Graham… a reference to Mormonism as a cult was scrubbed from the website of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.

…In a section of the website called Billy Graham’s My Answer there had been the question “What is a cult?”

Answer: “A cult is any group which teaches doctrines or beliefs that deviate from the biblical message of the Christian faith.”

“Some of these groups are Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, the Unification Church, Unitarians, Spritualists [“Spiritists” in original – RB], Scientologists, and others,” the site continued.

According to the Association’s Chief of Staff, Ken Barun:

“We removed the information from the website because we do not wish to participate in a theological debate about something that has become politicized during this campaign.”

That’s very difficult to believe. Would a Unitarian running for Presidential office, almost certainly as a Democrat, really be afforded the same consideration? Or would the two Grahams instead be railing against a liberal form of religion which from their perspective rejects essential Christian doctrines about the nature of Christ and the authority of the Bible?

The website also told readers that “it is very important that we recognize cults and avoid any involvement with them”. It’s not clear whether this is just a warning against taking part in religious activities involving such groups, or whether Christians should avoid other forms of contact with members. Either way, it may certainly have been a stumbling block for some Christian conservatives who wish to vote for Romney.

However, the removal of the site is welcome, even if it’s the result of political calculation rather than religious principle. Everybody knows that in popular understanding, the word “cult” has the connotation of an unreasonable religious group characterised by extreme commitment enforced through manipulative or coercive forms of behaviour. It’s a polemical term, deployed by the Billy Graham Association here to make people fearful of alternative religious beliefs.

Although the Association has not gone so far as to say that Mormonism is not cult, it’s the highest-profile conservative Christian step back from opposition to the religion. Last year, David Barton and Jim Garlow affirmed that Glenn Beck, despite being a Mormon, is actually “saved”; a few weeks ago, the neo-Pentecostal evangelist Rick Joyner went much further, invoking the unofficial Mormon “White Horse Prophecy” in support of Romney. Joyner explained that Mormons believe that the US Constitution is “God’s government on the earth”, and added that “maybe this was one of those true prophecies”.

Joyner also recalled that John F. Kennedy faced opposition in 1960 due to his Roman Catholicism. It should be remembered that Graham was involved in this, although he cleverly kept in the background and left Norman Vincent Peale to face accusations of religious bigotry. According to Stephen P. Miller’s Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South (2009, University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 80-81):

The evangelist stoked the religious issue in 1960 more than he was subsequently able to acknowledge. At the start of the election season, Graham and the strongly Republican Peale turned down a request from Kennedy to sign an open statement that criticized opposing a Catholic president along religious lines…

…Graham agreed to join Peale in encouraging Nixon to address religion more specifically in his public speeches… In early 1960, Peale served as chair for the National Conference of Citizens for Religious Freedom, held to address Protestant concerns about the election. Graham astutely refrained from lending his name to the Washington, D.C., gathering… He did, however, encourage Peale.

Graham was also discrete about his dislike of American Jews, which came to light only by chance decades after he expressed ugly views on the subject. His son Franklin, in contrast, is openly contemptuous of Islam, which he famously denounced “as a very wicked and evil religion”.

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George Galloway writes to the Home Secretary:

I am writing to you to ask you to investigate the behaviour of a senior member of the Metropolitan police’s counter-terrorism squad SO15 who, I believe, has been carrying out a campaign of vilification – a dirty tricks operation – against me in my constituency using police facilities and resources. I would also like to know whether this unwarranted intrusion was sanctioned by the Commissioner or other senior SO15 officers. 

The officer’s name is xxxxx. It is my understanding that his role is to investigate and report on radical Muslim groups. But perhaps you can clarify his remit precisely?

Galloway goes on to claim that the police officer had been introduced to him as a “security adviser” by his assistant following a break-in at his house. However:

…within hours of that I learned that he and xxxxx had been sleeping in my house, and without permission, while I was abroad. This came out because he had to tell the officers investigating the burglary that his fingerprints would be found in the house.

…I have now discovered that she has been leaking and distorting information from within my office and handing it on to xxxxx who, apart from using his Met police email address, has set up at least two others to pump out false information to national newspapers.

One’s first thought, inevitably, is that the use of police resources to make George Galloway look bad is somewhat superfluous to requirements.

According to a quote in the Bradford Telegraph & Argus:

A Metropolitan Police spokesman said: “We can confirm we received a complaint from a member of the public on October 15 with regard to the actions of an officer based within specialist operations. The matter has been passed to the MPS Directorate of Professional Standards to investigate and a voluntary referral is being made to the Independent Police Complaints Commission. The officer has been placed on restricted duties pending the outcome of the investigation.”

Footnote: Much of the Telegraph &Argus article consist of a long digression about a woman who has allegedly been subjected to intimidation by persons unknown for criticising Galloway’s comments on rape. While this is certainly newsworthy, we can only speculate as to why the paper decided to bundle the two stories together in the way it has.

(H/T , A Very Public Sociologist, writing on Twitter)

UPDATE: The Guardian has more: it turns out that Galloway’s former assistant is actually married to the police officer in question, and that she was “upfront about her spouse’s sensitive day job in the Muslim contact unit”. Further, she insists that her husband

never slept in the house, but simply “popped in to use the loo” one night before the break-in, and so warned officers investigating that they might find his prints. She says the emails Galloway has seized on as evidence of a plot against him are nothing of the sort. And that far from showing a police handler and his spy, they show a couple making “silly jokes”.

…She admitted asking [her husband] to set up a fake email address so that she could email the Guardian when she found out the paper was planning to do a report on Galloway and Respect six months on from the byelection victory. He did it for her, she says, “because I’m not that literate with computers”. (A “laughable” claim, according to Galloway.)

This extra context may be significant; but we still have a situation in which an SO15 police officer appears to have been colluding in surreptitious behaviour that was designed to have political consequences. It’s also unfortunate that there’s an ambiguity in the phrase “one night before”: does that mean “the night before”, or is it a non-specific “one night”?

The former assistant also makes accusations about attitudes within the Respect political party:

Some men in Respect hated the fact that she was a non-hijab-wearing Muslim woman, she says. “The atmosphere around Respect was so hostile to women. I was seen as an outspoken, opinionated woman who had ideas, who made things happen, who organised events and the guys didn’t like it at all… In his mind, he believes that if he discredits me, and makes me out to be a complete slag, then his supporters, the majority of whom are men, will not believe anything that comes out of my mouth … Also, I think it was a form of intimidation…”

Meanwhile, a report in the Daily Mail has the detail that

Mr Galloway said he felt ‘violated’ by the events

Given Galloway’s claim that the rape allegations against Julian Assange amount to no more than a case of “bad sexual etiquette”, that has to be the worst possible word he could have chosen.

UPDATE 2 (2016): The story has not ended well for Galloway:

George Galloway has been forced to pay out an undisclosed sum in damages to a former aide over claims that she conspired to run a “dirty tricks” campaign against him.

…Ms Ali-Khan’s solicitor, Mark Lewis, told Mr Justice Warby the statement said that a very senior officer in SO15 (Counter Terrorism Command) had been feeding disinformation aimed at damaging him to a national newspaper and to others.

…Mr Lewis said Ms Ali-Khan had not been feeding disinformation or deceit to national newspapers or acting as a police agent and had not slept with the officer – whom she had married in a sharia law ceremony – at Mr Galloway’s home.

Mr Galloway’s counsel, Adam Speker, said he accepted that the article and interviews given by individuals for whom he bore responsibility in relation to Ms Ali-Khan contained defamatory accusations for which he apologised.

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A few days ago, the BBC reported on pending legislation in Ukraine which would criminalise any “positive depiction” of gay people. The report notes the involvement of the Christian Hope evangelical church in Kiev, describing it as  “One of the legislation’s incubators”. The article includes an encounter with the church’s pastor, Valery Reshetinsky:

In his opinion, freedom of speech for sexual minorities is a violation of what he considers his inalienable right not to have to hear something he finds offensive.

“You can’t do everything that you want to do, because there are people who have the exact same rights as you do,” he insists.

The pastor goes on to accuse a worldwide conspiracy of Masons, New-Agers, postmodernists and financiers of various nationalities, of imposing ideas that are not “characteristic for Ukraine” on the nation’s children.

Reshetinsky previously featured on this blog in 2006, when I noted that his church was a “partner” of a child sponsorship charity named Eastern European Outreach. EEO was in turn an outreach of Calvary Chapel of Murrieta, California, and the charity was at the time being promoted through sales of a video game based on the Left Behind novels. Since then, references to Reshetinsky have gone from the EEO website, although at the time the site carried a profile by J. Lee Grady reposted from Charisma magazine . It included the following:

Reshetinski believes that God has given Ukraine a 15-year window of opportunity. If the church doesn’t seize the moment, he fears that Islam will fill the vacuum.

…Christian Hope Church currently operates 30 ministries that touch the needs of Ukrainians—including orphans, drug addicts and the blind. But because Reshetinski is a scientist at heart, he also wants to change the Soviet intellect. Schools in Russia and Ukraine are still atheistic. Christian Hope is working with Americans to establish an institute of scientific creationism in Kiev.

“Our No. 1 job must be to change the worldview of the people here and apply Christianity to economics, law and education…

“Please don’t allow the United States to become like Western Europe. Don’t allow it to become secular. I was so surprised to learn that until 1949 Christians had their hands in education in your country. But [John Dewey] took faith out of education. The church in your country has so many spiritual resources. Please keep America a Christian nation.”

Reshetinsky is integrated into international neo-Pentecostalism, and he has a number of American links. His church is described as a “Missionary Church” in a 2008 article by Bill C. Terry, who runs the men’s ministry of the International Pentecostal Holiness Church (IPHC), while Jim King Ministries of Tulsa tells us that:

We helped establish the Missionary Training Center in Kiev with Pastor Valeriy Reshetinsky. The center focuses on equipping emerging church leaders with tools to plant new churches.

The BBC report also includes a photo captioned “A Kiev protest against homosexuality by the ‘Embassy of God church'”. This church, also known as the “God Embassy”, was founded by a Nigerian immigrant named Sunday Adelaja, whom I discussed here. Adelaja also has international connections, and in 2008 he organised an event in Atlanta featuring Ben Stein, Truett Cathy (founder of Chick-fil-A), and the virulently anti-gay Latvian pastor Alexey Ledyaev. Naturally, Adelaja worried about “the homosexual movement.”

(Ledyaev’s “New Generation” churches in turn have an outreach in the UK, and a link has been made with the lobby group Christian Concern)

(H/T to a reader)

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Claim endorsed by William Murray, Mark Gabriel, and Pamela Geller

Last week, WND‘s Jerome Corsi put forward the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama wears a ring engraved in Arabic with the words “In the Name of Allah”, the fifth part of the Muslim declaration of faith, or Shahada. The theory relied on an image blown up to such an extent that it was seriously blurred, although Snopes has since published a large and very clear photo which should have put the whole non-story to bed. Snopes judges the story to be “probably false” rather than just “false”, but it is obvious that the supposed Arabic inscription is simply a loop pattern. It’s not in the least amenable to any other interpretation.

However, although that should have been the end of the matter, WND and Corsi have ploughed on regardless with follow-up articles, and the story remains a banner headline on the WND homepage. They have even managed to prompt a short piece in a Turkish newspaper.

Corsi writes:

Joel Gilbert, who was first to conclude that the ring bears the Shahada, has issued a detailed analysis he prepared with the assistance of Yousef Shehadeh, a native Arabic speaker from Nazareth who studied Arabic for 13 years in the Holy Land and now works as a graphic artist in Los Angeles.

Gilbert, who has studied Arabic himself, told WND he sent close-up photographs of the ring to Shehadeh “cold,” without offering any opinion, and asked Shehadeh to evaluate them.

Shehadeh replied to him that the script on Obama’s ring is Arabic, and it is the first part of the Islamic declaration of faith.

You’ll note that that link is dead; Gilbert appears to have lost confidence in his “detailed analysis”, and he’s also taken down a YouTube video on the subject. Gilbert featured on this blog a couple of weeks ago; he heads a Bob Dylan tribute band, and he recently produced a documentary claiming that Frank Marshall Davis was Obama’s father and that Ann Dunham had appeared in pornographic magazines. Gilbert also describes himself as an “Islamic history scholar”, although he appears to be basing this claim on his undergraduate studies in the 1980s.

A couple of individuals who have set themselves up as experts on the dangers of Islam staked their credibility on agreeing with Gilbert’s claim:

Staffers in Jordan with William J. Murray’s Religious Freedom Coalition also believe the ring, which Obama wore on his wedding-ring finger for at least a decade before he married Michelle Robinson, pays homage to Allah.

The Amman staffers said they have seen other rings like it.

Egyptian-born Islamic scholar Mark A. Gabriel, Ph,D., as well as a native-Arabic speaker employed by WND who has provided translations of critical Arabic statements, believe the ring is Islamic. A Duke professor interviewed by Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze.com news service also confirmed their conclusion.

Given that Obama’s ring comes from Indonesia, it’s not clear why Murray’s “Amman staffers” would see a special resemblance to rings in Jordan.

The “Duke professor” wisely kept his name “off the record”. William Murray has also featured on this blog previously: last year, he took part in the “Constitution or Sharia” conference in Nashville, at which speakers included the likes of Christian Concern’s Paul Diamond. Gabriel, meanwhile, is Founder and President” of the Union of Former Muslims, and the author of Culture Clash: Islam’s War on America.

Also more or less on board was Andrew Bostom, who declared that Corsi’s and Gabriel’s evidence “appear to be” sound, as was Pamela Geller:

She said Obama’s “anti-freedom, pro-jihad foreign policy has given the global jihad a new lease on death, and clearly he is happy about that, as this ring indicates.”

Robert Spencer, meanwhile, was slightly more cautious:

[Spencer] said that should the ring on Obama’s finger prove to include an inscription of an Islamic prayer, it could explain his foreign policy attitudes and actions regarding freedom in the Middle East.

Other sites, meanwhile, have suggested that the ring shows that Obama is “married to Allah”. This is not a concept that is found in normative Islam.

Oddly, one person who was unimpressed was Glenn Beck’s End-Times prophet Joel Richardson:

Joel Richardson… said he was skeptical that there was an Arabic script on the ring, which he has not examined personally.

What a shame that Richardson wasn’t similarly sceptical when his associate Walid Shoebat  claimed that the Arabic contours of “In the Name of Allah” are present in the Biblical Greek for “666”. Arabic letters seem to be particularly amendable to this kind of “reading in”: some Muslims themselves have sometimes claimed to have found the words “In the Name of Allah” present in natural phenomena.

Snopes also raises the point that

One might also consider the incongruity that a politician who has long been dealing with (and denying) rumors that he is a Muslim would openly wear a symbol demonstrating those rumors to be true.

Actually, I doubt very much that Obama himself spends time “dealing with” such a rumour, but there’s an implied further element in the conspiracy: perhaps Obama is secretly signalling his Muslim allegiance to other Muslims, who are collectively keeping it to themselves (see Update 2 below). Hence we recently saw discredited fake “ex-terrorist” Kamal Saleem explain to Frank Gaffney that when Obama recites the pledge of allegiance  he holds his hand in a special way that shows he is really performing an Islamic prayer. In 2009, WND‘s Joseph Farah claimed that Obama had made a speech “in code” to the Muslim world in which he conveyed a promise to revive and continue Hitler’s Holocaust (no, really).

UPDATE: I wasn’t aware of just how deeply Geller invested in this. On Wednesday 10 October, she wrote:

I’d like to see one member of the press corps ask Obama about this. It certainly jives with Obama’s islamophilia and his pro-sharia foreign policies, and with his extensive Muslim background, as detailed in my book, The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America.

The implications of Obama’s ring aside, the level of his dishonesy is breathtaking. Jerome Corsi over at WND has this blockbuster story.

That entry in her Atlas Shrugs blog has now been deleted – and, as expected, she has felt no need to offer her audience either an apology or an explanation. Robert Spencer behaves in the same way (see here and here for two examples). I’ll repeat what I’ve said before: any blogger dealing in current affairs is likely to make a mistake from time to time; but what separates a serious person from a charlatan or demagogue is how one attempts to put a mistake right (H/T The American Muslim).

UPDATE 2: And I now see that Corsi has indeed claimed that Muslims are in on the ring conspiracy, speaking with VCY (“Voice of Christian Youth) America’s Vic Eliason on 12 October. Right Wing Watch has the transcript:

It’s almost like it’s a secret communication, like it’s a wink-wink and ‘I’m with you.’ In Islam, taqiyya which is a practice, it is okay for believers in Islam to mislead infidels. So in other words you can lie, you can say you’re Christian if that serves your purposes and in Islam the high point of taqiyya would be to communicate to believers that that’s what you’re doing and that’s what I think this ring could easily do.

This then bizarrely segues into the claim that Obama is a promiscuous homosexual.

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From WND:

It was at the Congressional Black Caucus that Sen. John Edwards, D-S.C., then a vice presidential running mate with Sen. John Kerry, made a speech in which he cited the words of Isaiah 9:10 on the third anniversary of 9/11 in explaining how the U.S. could respond. In fact, he didn’t just site the ancient curse of judgment, he built his entire speech around it.

But a member of that caucus, Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Texas, took the time to write a formal letter of thanks to WND Chief Executive Officer Joseph Farah for the gifts of “The Harbinger” and “The Isaiah 9:10 Judgment” distributed to every member of Congress last month.

“I look forward to reading your book on my flights back to Dallas,” she said.

…Johnson joins Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, Democrat Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, Sen. Michael Enzi, R-Ind., Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., and Sen Dan Coates, R-Ind. along with Reps. Sue Myrick, R-N.C., Nick Rahall II, R-W.V.; Lamar Smith, R-Texas; Joe Wilson, R-S.C., and Ben Quayle, R-Ariz.

I’ve discussed the background to Jonathan Cahn’s book The Harbinger previously. In the days after 9/11, Edwards had quoted Isaiah 9:10:

The bricks have fallen, but we will build with dressed stones; the sycamores have been cut down, but we will put cedars in their place.

Alas, however, Edwards (or, perhaps, his speech-writer) didn’t bother to look at the wider context of the passage: the Biblical author presents it as a futile boast by ancient Israel that they would repel neighbouring enemies through their own efforts, when in fact their enemies represent the wrath of God.

For Cahn, this is not just an example of ignorant quote-mining: he seems to regard it as a magical invocation, through which Edwards (and later Tom Daschle, who quoted the same passage at a later date) has unleashed a supernatural curse on the USA; God seems to be little more than an impersonal and mechanistic force. As well as the book and Joseph Farah’s tie-in DVD, a “study guide” is due for release in January, under the tagline “Decode the mysteries and respond to the call that can change America’s future – and YOURS”.

Back in May, WND reported that Lt. Gov. Todd Lamb of Oklahoma had made a call to thank a man who had given copies of the book to members of the legislature. Of course, as with the letters sent to Farah, this may have been no more than a polite acknowledgements.

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In February 2006, the media noted the presence of sanguinary signs at a protest organised by an al-Muhajiroun front-group outside the Danish embassy in London. The signs bore slogans such as “Massacre those who Insult Islam”, and they were crudely but distinctively created with black marker-pens and white cardboard.

The phrase “Massacre those who Insult Islam” has now made a comeback, this time on properly-printed banners. These new banners can be seen in an EPA photograph taken at a 5 October protest in Kolkata/Calcutta. According to the blurb, “Hundreds of protesters, from the Muslim Group of Bengal [for Peace], rallied to denounce the anti-Islam film ‘Innocence of Muslims'”; these specific banners, though, also include the detail “Organised by the Aashiqan e-Rasool Committee”, along with what appears to be an address. They are shown intermingled with banners from other groups (including one, oddly, which shows Obama in the form of a Na’vi from the film Avatar), and judging from other crowd photos in the set they do not appear to have been widely distributed among the protestors.

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