Bartholomew's Notes

Nigerian humanist Igwe reports:

In March, Nigeria’s notorious witch hunter, Helen Ukpabio, is organising a “Deliverance Session” in the United States, according to infomation posted on the web site of the Liberty Gospel Church. The event is slated for March 14-25 at Liberty Gospel Church in Houston, Texas. The program is said to be “12 days of battling with the spirit for freedom.”

…Ukpabio organizes deliverance sessions where she identifies and exorcizes people, mainly children, of witchcraft. Headquartered in Calabar in Southern Nigeria, the Liberty Gospel Church has grown to be a witch hunting church with branches in Nigeria and overseas.

Ukpabio’s advert gives no address for the Liberty Gospel Church in Houston, although one of the phone numbers provided belongs to Glorious Praise Ministries. This church is led by Pastor Jonathan A. David (also known as Jonathan Agba), and Ukpabio was previously there in 2010.

Ukpabio famously featured in a Channel 4 documentary about the plight of child witches in late 2008, and she complains that she has been unfairly maligned – witches who are brought to her church are simply prayed over, and once cured the former witch is reintegrated with his or her family. This is in contrast to other contexts, in which peripatetic healers perform bizarre and abusive rituals, or where children are harmed or abandoned after being identified as being witches.

However, this self-justification ignores several factors. First, children will only ever be safe from harm from witchcraft-related stigmatisation when belief in child witches has been eradicated. Leo is humanist, but it is perfectly possible to be a Christian and to understand that the idea of “child witches” goes against reason and has no support in Biblical teaching. Ukpabio’s teaching keeps this harmful belief alive, and not everyone adversely influenced by her books and DVDs will come to her church.

Second, to tell a child that he or she has caused family misfortune or bereavement through being a witch is obviously grotesquely cruel in itself.

Third, Ukpabio’s behaviour shows that she is malign. Leo again (links added):

Thanks to the activities of a UK based charity, the Stepping Stones Nigeria and its local partners, the problem of witchcraft accusations of children and the ignominious roles of Ukpabio and her Liberty Gospel Church and other ‘superstition miners’ were brought to the attention of the world. Since the broadcast of the documentary, Ukpabio and her thugs at the Liberty Gospel church have been campaigning to undermine Stepping Stones Nigeria and its efforts to tackle and address the problem of child witch hunting in Nigeria.

They brought several lawsuits against SSN and its partners, and lost. They have embarked on a smear campaign using local journalists to publish reports in the media which portrayed the projects of SSN in Nigeria as fraud.

In 2009, Ukpabio mobilized her church members against a local seminar on witchcraft and the rights of the child organised by Stepping Stones and the Nigerian Humanist Movement in Calabar, Cross River State. They invaded the venue, beat me up and stole my personal belongings. While the police were still investigating the matter, Helen Ukpabio and her church members went to court. They sued me, SSN and its partners asking that we pay them millions of dollars in damages for depriving them of the right to believe in witchcraft. Again they lost.

Ukpabio’s targets have included a man who runs a hostel for stigmatised children, whom she denounced as a “wizard”; the governor of Akwa Ibom state, whom she warned to “remember what happened to Saddam Hussein”; and the British actress Sophie Okonedo, who narrated the Channel 4 documentary. Members of Ukpabio’s church have created an abusive website where her critics are attacked in crude terms; I am described there as a murderer and a rapist, and as married to a “mongolis [sic] idiot”. The site was set up by Ukpabio’s webmaster, and has her personal endorsement. (1)

(1) To complicate matters, an unrelated on-line stalker I have in the UK has latched onto this site and made abusive attacks of his own while hiding behind the church’s name. Details here.

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From a 28 December article by Alexander Golts in the Moscow Times:

Russian Railways president Vladimir Yakunin sent a strong message of support last week to Russia’s leaders through the company’s newspaper Gudok: “On behalf of the entire management of Russian Railways, we support the course of democratic development in Russia, and we consider it impossible not to respond to the unprecedentedly shameless campaign to discredit the Russian state. … The filth that has been poured on the state and its leaders [from various opposition groups] has no connection with democracy. Moreover, it is a direct threat to the sovereignty of our country.”

Yakunin’s hard-line stance is not a surprise: back in March he presented a “Dialogue of Civilizations International Prize” to Nursultan Nazarbayev, just prior to elections in Kazakhstan; there is no indication that Nazarbayev’s recent bloody crackdown against strikers in Zhanaozen has led to any sort of re-think.

Yakunin runs the St Andrew the First-Called Foundation, which recently brought the Virgin Mary’s belt from Mount Athos to Russia for a special tour; the Foundation also organises the “World Public Forum Dialogue of Civilisation”, which holds international-level conferences in Rhodes and other locations. Among those involved with the Forum is former Chancellor of Austria Alfred Gusenbauer, who represents another link to Nazarbayev, as well as various dignitaries and academics. The Forum also has links with the US Christian Right – one of the “co-chairmen” is a businessman named Nicholas Papanicolaou, who is involved with the Oak Initiative alongside neo-Pentecostal evangelist Rick Joyner and Gen. “Jerry” Boykin. At the most recent Rhodes event, Yakunin’s wife co-moderated a session on “Maintaining Family Values in the 21st Century” with Larry Jacobs of the World Congress of Families.

Yakunin regards himself as a social commentator, and the Forum has published some of his speeches and articles; in his opening speech at the most recent Rhodes conference, he noted “incompatibility between the neo-liberal interpretation of the system of human rights and the system of human values”, and 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”. The WPF website also carries a more recent article, in which he discusses “Dialogue of Civilizations in the Times of Global Transformations”. Here, he shows a bit more sympathy for Russian discontent:

As I view it, lying at the basis of the events taking place in Russia – events of which we are both witnesses and participants – there is a maturing feeling of all-embracing injustice. This injustice or unfairness concerns the life we are leading; this injustice pertains to the arbitrariness of official functionaries; this also holds true of the unfairness concerning the blatant disregard on the part of the oligarchic elite of business circles for their country and their people; and, of course, this concerns the impermissible property inequality that we are witnessing.

However:

…having come face-to-face with a systemic crisis in the USA itself, a crisis that has swerved out of control of the financial system, the Americans, especially on the threshold of elections and with the unemployment rate hopping above 8%, must, by hook or by crook, shift the point of tensions to another place. The ways and means of attaining these goals are only too well known – a triumphant but not very blood-spilling war, destabilization and conflicts further away from the borders of the USA and Europe, shaping and molding the scarecrow of a threat (read: enemy) for general public consumption (such scarecrow candidates, as is known, are always close at hand).

Whether accidentally or not, but the crisis of the world social system is accompanied by a cold-blooded destruction of ancient centers and monuments of Ecumene – the cradles of the whole earthly civilization, and this includes the museums in Iraq and Libya, manuscripts in Egypt and architectural monuments of Carthage in Tunisia, to say nothing already of the destruction of the Orthodox Holy places in Serbia and Pristina.

It’s difficult to reconcile this lofty criticism with Yakunin’s role in the political realities of modern Russia, as described in Golts’ Moscow Times article:

During Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s annual call-in television show two weeks ago, employees of Uralvagonzavod, a factory in Nizhny Tagil that manufactures train cars, called in and offered to help break up the Moscow demonstrations, if necessary… Valery Yakushev, a Uralvagonzavod factory worker and State Duma deputy for United Russia, showered Putin with support during the call-in show.

…This is no surprise considering that the bright prospects for Uralvagonzavod recounted by factory worker Yakushev are a direct result of state subsidies — 2 billion rubles ($64.2 million) last year and 64 billion rubles ($2.1 billion) that Putin has personally promised for this year.

…One other interesting tidbit from the whole Uralvagonzavod affair: The factory’s chairman of the board is Yevgeny Shkolov, who, according to news reports, worked in the 1980s alongside Putin at the KGB station in Dresden. What’s more, Russian Railways head Yakunin, whose subordinates so strongly express their support for Putin and who loves to buy up tens of thousands of train cars from Uralvagonzavod, also worked for the KGB. Yakunin, together with Putin, was also one of the founders of the Ozero dacha community in the Leningrad region in the 1990s.

And by a strange coincidence, most members of Ozero, who showed little business talent in the 1990s, suddenly became some of the country’s most successful millionaires and billionaires at the same time that Putin rose to power. Meanwhile, Uralvagonzavod reached record levels of production when Putin’s friend and colleague, Yakunin, took over Russian Railways and started ordering train cars as if they were hot piroshki.

Meanwhile, the St Andrew Foundation is currently leading protests against the recent arrest in Greece of Archimandrite Ephraim, abbot of the Vatopedi monastery on Mount Athos (and home of the Virgin Mary’s belt).

UPDATE: Meanwhile, a minion working for President Medvedev gave his own opinion of the protestors in December. According to The Week:

RUSSIA’S unfolding political crisis has descended into farce after President Dmitry Medvedev appeared to take to Twitter to accuse opposition activists of being “stupid sheep getting fucked in the mouth”.

…Nobody believes the president is responsible, but it is a blow to his image as a tech-savvy leader. The Kremlin blamed an unidentified official and said: “The guilty will be punished.”

I suspect that a story doing the rounds (e.g. Private Eye 1305 p. 12) that Vladimir Putin had refered to protestors as “sodomized sheep” during a TV phone-in is a garbled version of this story, conflated with an incident in which Putin mocked protestors’ white ribbons as being “condoms”.

*Spelling variation (cough): “Putin had refered to protestors as sodomised sheep”.

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English Defence League leader Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (“Tommy Robinson”) has appeared on Michael Coren’s Canadian Arena TV show, discussing the recent attack on him and how he perceives the local situation in Luton. Yaxley-Lennon’s talking points were essentially a condensed version of a “New Year Message” which was posted on-line a few days ago.

News that Yaxley-Lennon had been attacked appeared just before Christmas on the Gates of Vienna blog, sourced to the EDL:

He was out driving, when he saw a car similar to his wife’s, driven by a blond white girl. The other car flashed its lights so Tommy pulled over.

A group of Pakistani youths wearing knuckle dusters poured out. Tommy was knocked out pretty quickly, and they gave him a good kicking.

He looks pretty beaten up, but no bones were broken, and no eyes or teeth are missing. He had a brain scan this morning. We don’t know the results yet.

He has spoken to The Sun, who asked whether he had called the police. Tommy said there was no point, as a racial attack on a white guy was of no interest to them.

An update to the post has an extra detail:

Message from Tommy: “They were shouting ‘allahu akhbar’ and ‘Merry Christmas, Tommy'”.

In his New Year statement, Yaxley-Lennon adds that his assailants were shouting “this is for our mosque”; the attack took place just after the council announced it was reversing a decision to sell some local land to a Shia Muslim group to build a mosque (the decision had been opposed by a separate campaign led by Yaxley-Lennon’s uncle). He also tells this to Coren, although he revises a couple of other details:

Coren: There were rumours that they were chanting “allah akbar” and “Merry Christmas Tommy” as they were kicking you. Is that true?

Yaxley-Lennon: No, the last thing which I can categorically say I heard was “we’re going to kill you, you white pig”. That was the final thing I heard before I was knocked out.

Yaxley-Lennon eventually did make a complaint to the police, although he won’t give evidence under oath:

where I live… you just can’t go to court and point at people.

According to the North West Infidels, which split with the EDL some time ago, Yaxley-Lennon was in fact assaulted by some local football hooligans as part of an internal dispute; the NWI claims “this is proper info from a good lad”, although no actual evidence is forthcoming. Of course, there are doubtless young local Muslims who would be willing to harm Yaxley-Lennon given the opportunity, either in revenge for EDL insults against Islam or because the EDL is seen as hostile to their community. However, that willingness is more likely to be determined by social circumstance rather than religious imperative.

Yaxley-Lennon makes a number of other accusations in his statements: he claims that police and media are covering up Muslim intimidation, and in his New Year statement he names a particular Muslim police officer as being “bent”. He also claims that a spate of car firebombings incorrectly thought to have been the work of the EDL had in fact been perpetrated by Muslims who were now in jail.

Michael Coren is an enthusiastically sympathetic interviewer, and on his blog he describes Yaxley-Lennon as

an anti-fascist, a supporter of free speech, and someone who is prepared to expose the authentic nature of Islam.

Coren also gives regular air-time to Paul Weston of the British Freedom Party, which has recently entered into an “association” with the EDL; Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer have also been guests on his show.

Coren is a member of the more intellectual end of the Catholic right, and he is particularly known for his objections to homosexuality.

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The Daily Mail‘s Chris Hastings strikes again:

The Palace of Westminster has rejected demands to serve halal meat in its restaurants.

Muslim MPs and peers have been told they cannot have meat slaughtered in line with Islamic tradition because the method – slitting an animal’s throat without first stunning it – is offensive to many of their non-Muslim colleagues.

Some rather basic questions: who is making the “demands”? Who has told “Muslim MPs and peers” that halal will not be made available? And what is the basis for claiming that the reason halal food remains unavailable is that “many… non-Muslim colleagues” find it “offensive”?

Hastings, however, offers only the following:

…The stance has infuriated some parliamentarians who have eaten meat in the Palace’s 23 restaurants and cafes, having been assured that it was halal. 

Lord Ahmed of Rotherham said: ‘I did feel misled. I think a halal option should be made available.’

…However, a spokesman for the House of Lords and the House of Commons confirmed that it was not served in their restaurants.

That’s it. There’s no “demand” here from Lord Ahmed, and the quotes do not support the other claims in Hastings’ article.

The only discussion on the availability of halal food  at Westminster that I can find dates from 2006. The House of Commons Administration Committee produced a report entitled Refreshment Department Services, which in paragraphs 88 and 89 included the following:

Responses to the Committee from sufferers of nut allergies and Coeliac Disease highlighted the difficulty of obtaining basic information on the ingredients of food currently available in RD outlets. Several submissions to the Committee suggested making available a wider and more imaginative range of vegetarian food. Responses from House staff and Members’ staff suggested making halal and kosher food available.

…We recommend… that the Department should examine the feasibility of providing foods to meet special requirements such as gluten-free, kosher and halal diets.

This was based on the following submissions to the committee:

Yasmin Ataullah, Asad Rehman, Lara Sami, Office of George Galloway MP

1. We write on behalf of many Muslim members of staff within the Palace of Westminster with a request for you to consider using halal meat in the Refreshment Department. There are a number of Muslims working within the parliamentary estate, both as House of Commons staff, and as MP’s staff.

2. We would very much like to be able to choose from the entire menu, rather than always having to opt for the vegetarian meals on the menu. I am sure that the four Muslim Members of the House of Commons would appreciate this as well as the many Muslims working within the parliamentary estate.

3. I would be grateful if you would seriously consider catering for the needs of all parliamentary staff by introducing the use of halal meat.

4. I am aware that the Refreshment Department already has arrangements for the supply of halal meat when catering for functions sponsored by MPs. As such, I believe that the introduction of halal meat for our canteens would not be too troublesome.

Mashood Ahmed, House of Lords Computer Officice

My only suggestion is for you to provide more Halal/Kosher food.

A subsequent Response from the Refreshment Department included the following:

Catering for customers with strict religious dietary requirements is more problematic. Both kosher and halal food require separate preparation as well as the purchasing of suitable foods; for strict religious observance this can only be achieved by having separate kitchen facilities and separate equipment for the preparation of kosher or halal foods. This could only be achieved if one of the Department’s venues was specifically designated for this purpose and appropriately qualified chefs engaged. We do not believe that this is a viable option, even in the medium term, and recommend that the Refreshment Department continues to cater for requests for strict kosher or halal meals by buying them in from approved suppliers.

So far as I can see, there has been no official discussion of the issue since then, much less one involving “infuriated” Muslims and non-Muslims finding halal “offensive”.

Catering decisions and policies at the Palace of Westminster are clearly made following consultations and discussions that are made public. Hastings should be able to provide evidence from more recent documents to support the claims in his article – instead, he pads his piece out with irrelevant asides such as that “members of the Church of England have complained that the spread of halal meat was ‘effectively spreading Sharia law’ across Britain.” It looks very much that the Mail is fanning a bogus controversy in order to heighten a sense of discord between Muslims and non-Muslims in the UK.

It should be recalled that Hastings has form as a yellow journalist. He recently whipped up a “BBC uses BCE-CE dating system” hysteria, and before that was responsible for a completely bogus story about how the television series Downton Abbey was being re-edited for American television due to “fear its intricate plot will baffle U.S. viewers”. That story prompted US television critic Jace Lacob to make it clear that he considers Hastings to lack journalistic integrity.

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From the Voice of Russia:

In the late hours of Tuesday [27 December], 10 police officers appeared on Mount Athos. It was rather strange to see policemen in a place where no strangers can be usually met except for pilgrims – the more so because the monasteries on Mount Athos have a special status which makes them to a large extent independent from the Greek government.

Father Ephraim was arrested and taken to a police office in Athens, as if he was not a respectable abbot but a gang boss.

The sight could have been a lot stranger: it seems that the Greek state was respectful enough of the site’s “special status” not to send in any policewomen.

Father Ephraim heads the famous Vatopedi monastery – and for a “respectable abbot” he is particularly astute when it comes to real estate deals:

The abbot is accused of financial embezzlement and fraudulent realty deals. The deals involved exchanging less valuable land for higher-value land which belonged tom the state. But, later, the Greek authorities decided that the bargain was unequal – and are now claiming that, as a result, the state has lost at least € 100 mln.

The land swap has been a source of controversy since 2008, as I blogged here.

Ephraim was in the news a few weeks ago, when a relic from Vatopedi was displayed in Russia – this was the Belt of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and its tour across Russia was organised by the St Andrew the First-Called Foundation. This organisation is controlled by Vladimir Yakunin, a close confidant of Putin, and Yakunin believed that the belt would promote “family values” in Russia. In September, Ephraim spoke at a conference in Austria on the subject of Mount Athos – the conference was arranged by the World Public Forum, which was co-founded by Yakunin, and it had the aim of “protecting” Mount Athos.

The Voice of Russia and Interfax both carry quotes from Sergey Rudov, head of a charity called “The Society of Friends of the Vatopedi monastery”. According to Rudov:

“Staying in cold Russia was a serious trial for him. And when he visited Patriarch Ilia in Georgia, he wasn’t far from dying. Father Yefrem needs constant medical attention. He was questioned for 30 hours in Greece. And they told him during questioning: you’ve been to Russia, you talked to Putin, Medvedev, but they won’t help you,” Rudov said. 

Ephraim met Putin at the end of the tour, and he asked for Russia to assist Greece “under these challenging conditions”.

Rudov adds:

“There could be two reasons behind Abbot Ephraim’s arrest… One is that the EU has now been insisting for a long time that the Athos monasteries should be stripped of their special status and subordinated to the Greek government to a greater extent, because the EU is unhappy about the fact that currently, one needs a special visas to be able to visit the monasteries on Mount Athos. The second reason is that some people in Europe are unhappy about the growing influence of Russians in Greece – mainly because of the close ties between the Greek and the Russian Churches.”

Certainly, the Russian Orthodox Church has in recent years been positioning itself as the natural protector of Orthodoxy in Greece and other countries, and it has sought to sideline the Ecumenical Patriarch, who resides in Istanbul.

The Voice of Russia adds a third theory:

…the Greek government is trying to put press on the Church in an attempt to make it help the Greek state financially – something which Greece, as a country most affected by the financial crisis in Europe, badly needs.

The Friends have created a petition condemning the arrest:

We hereby condemn with abhorrence the judicial ‘’crime’ committed in Athens on the 23rd December 2011, against the Church in the face of Elder Efrem, Abbot of the Great, Holy Monastery of Vatopaidi in theHolyMountain.

The decision to take Elder Efrem into custody was based on hatred and prejudice. This is manifested in the following:

1. The timing of the decision: Christmas Eve
2. The surrounding of the Holy Mountain by armed police forces despite the declaration by the attorney representing the Elder that the latter intended to present himself to the police willingly.
3. The sentence passed is normally given to people who have the intention to repeat the offences accused of.
4. During the preliminary hearing the reason given for the sentence was the Elder’s recent trip to Russia, when he accompanied the Holy Belt of the Most Holy Mother of God. During this visit millions of people, including the President, the Prime Minister and the Attorney General of the Russian Republic came out to greet them.
5. The investigation lasted more than three years and no incriminating evidence has been found.
6. The offence which the Elder is accused of is ‘aiding and abetting’ even though the suspects of this offence have been acquitted.
7. During the last three years of the investigation, the Elder has taken numerous trips abroad and if he had intended to leave the country he had plenty of opportunity to do so.
8. The Elder, as a spiritual figure, is honored and praised worldwide and constitutes an excellent envoy for Greece.
9. The people who have been revealed as the masterminds of the conspiracy against him have been honored with ministerial posts and are attempting to cover up their deception at all costs.
10. In Greece, enormous scandals have been uncovered and established while those responsible are not only walking free but are also given political posts.

We are convinced that the decision is a deliberate political act intending to defame the Holy Mountain and the Church.

Meanwhile, the Voice of Russia reports that:

The Russian St. Andrew Foundation, which organized the coming of Mary’s belt to Russia, has sent its representative to Greece. The representative is already in Athens, and is trying, together with Father Ephraim’s lawyers, to find ways of helping him.

The Foundation also called for protests; Greek Reporter notes:

In its latest announcement, the foundation mentions that “the order and persistence, evident in the persecution of the Athonite elder, allow us once again to assume that the separate litigation between Vatopedi Monastery and the Greek state, constitute a reason to affect the foundation of values of the European community and an attack on global Orthodoxy, the spiritual center of which is Holy Mountain Athos” and expresses his surprise because “Greek judicial authorities ignored the unanimous appeal of the Holy Community of Mt. Athos in support of the priest, and that expressed by tens of thousands of orthodox people in online social networks”.

The announcement of the Russian Foundation concludes with an appeal to the faithful “to show their indignation on the inhumane decisions of the Athens Court of Appeal chamber, and following the example of orthodox citizens in Russia and Cyprus, to organize protests at the Embassies of Greece and the agencies of the European Union in several states”.

A 2008 article by Ioannis Michaletos and Christopher Deliso has further background context, although tending towards the speculative:

…The implication has been raised that Ephraim of Vatopedi seemed to have the ambition of becoming an important behind-the-scenes figure in an emerging ‘Orthodox Vatican’ centered around his own monastery. Its bank accounts were recently found to be in excess of 200 million euros…

By piecing together a variety of off-the-record diplomatic sources and anecdotal material, one can create a patchwork of activities for which the monastery, and the Holy Mountain in general, seem ideally suited.

These activities include major international business deals, high-level, third-party communications linkages, meetings of minds, political intriguing and even espionage. Indeed, rumors of intelligence agencies’ protected ‘safe houses’ on the isolated shores of Athos persist and it would seem that the remote, well-regulated and controlled nature of the place would by nature make it ideal for any kind of activity requiring discretion and silence.

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Press photographer Peter Marshall has a set of photos of

a large and noisy protest on the third anniversary of the Israeli attack on Gaza called for an end of the ongoing violence against Palestinians and the siege on Gaza. UK. 27th December 2011.

The protest took place opposite the Israeli embassy in London, and a few of the photos (here,  here, and here) show a small nearby counter-protest. The distinctive figure of Jonathan Hoffman of the Zionist Federation can be seen at the front, but the Christian Zionist group Mordecai Voice appears to have been prominently involved – although not named, the same distinctive Israeli and British flags with religious messages stenciled on were used at a rally the group organised in July. According to Marshall:

The smaller group of protesters waving Israeli flags on the opposite side of the road from the main protest stated that Hamas is committed to the destruction of the state of Israel and the killing of the Jews. They also accused the Palestine Solidarity Committed of refusing to support the peace process over Israel.

The Christian Zionist banners, however, focused primarily on the supernatural significance of the conflict: one banner reads “G-d A-Mighty Gave the LAND of ISRAEL to the JEWS”, another announces that “Israel Your G-D is Coming”, and a third describes Israel as the Apple of God’s eye (a particular Mordecai Voice slogan).

One of the photos also catches a glimpse of someone at the back of the counter-protest wearing a Jewish Task Force jacket – the JTF is so extreme that earlier this year the English Defence League baulked at the idea of an alliance, for reasons I discussed here. Of course, the presence of a JTF activist at a public event does not in itself mean that other participants either agree with the JTF or even know anything about it.

Mordecai Voice is a project of Pastor Tim Gutmann, who is with the Derbyshire-based Junction 28 Church; this is an Assemblies of God congregation. According to the Mordecai Voice website, the group is planning a “UK Night to honour Israel”, citing Pastor John Hagee by name as the “American equivalent”. Hagee’s religious views are apocalyptic and include “New World Order” conspiracy theories.

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Charles Johnson:

The so-called “counter-jihad” bloggers are covering themselves in glory again, slobbering and ranting and trying to take advantage of a terrible crime to advance their un-American agenda.

…This time they’ve seized on a story about a man in Texas who killed six members of his own family on Christmas morning while dressed in a Santa suit, then committed suicide. The man’s wife had left him, his home had been foreclosed upon, his business was failing, and he had filed for bankruptcy; with anyone else, these things would be considered strong motives for committing this massacre.

But because the man’s name was Aziz Yazdanpanah, and he was apparently unhappy about who his daughter was dating, these bloggers have decided it had to be an “Islamic honor killing.” And now they’re letting their bigotry run free again.

Robert Spencer responds:

@jihadwatchRS …Off your meds again, eh, Charles?

@Lizardoid …Must be all the Butterball shariah turkey I ate for Christmas.

@jihadwatchRS …Wow! Deceptively mislabeled food makes you carry water for a mass murderer & his ideology! #Usefulidiot

@jihadwatchRS …The guy murdered his whole family. You are making excuses for him. Who is paying you?

The full exchange (including bonus abusive contributions from Pamela Geller) can be seen here.

Johnson pointed out problems with the honour killing motive in Texas – according to Spencer, this means that Johnson supports the killer’s “ideology” , that he is “making excuses” for the killer, and that he must be doing so for money. Further comment on that is superfluous.

Of course, the above doesn’t tell us anything new about Spencer and how he operates, although it is a particularly egregious example of why this man should not be taken seriously by anyone who is concerned about honour killings or any other matter of public concern. It’s remarkable that a public figure like John Bolton would debase himself by endorsing Spencer’s work.

In April, Spencer and his allies will be holding yet another conflab. According to the promotional blurb:

The prominent human rights organization American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), its Stop Islamization of America (SIOA) program and the Virginia Anti-Shariah Task Force (VAST) will be hosting the first-ever human rights conference dedicated to exposing the plight of women under Islamic law in Dearborn, Michigan on the anniversary of the honor murder of Jessica Mokdad: the Jessica Mokdad Human Rights Conference.

…The confirmed list of speakers includes ex-Muslim human rights activist Nonie Darwish; Sudanese ex-slave and freedom fighter Simon Deng; and James Lafferty of the Virginia Anti-Sharia Taskforce (VAST), co-host of the Conference. Also speaking will be David Wood of Acts 17 Apologetics, a Christian group that is suing the city of Dearborn for covering up Islamic honor killings performed in the area – that cover-up, and the resulting suit, will also be a focus of the Jessica Mokdad Human Rights Conference.

In other words, a conference on ” the plight of women under Islamic law in Dearborn” will include only one speaker local to the area, and he’s a evangelist who is focused on the need for Muslims to convert to Christianity. Familiar anti-Islam polemicists will be there, but no-one who has any professional expertise or personal experience of honour killings in the USA. Spencer’s exchange with Johnson shows us what level of discussion to expect.

Last year, Geller and Spencer trumpeted their commitment to providing “safe houses” for those at risk from honour killings – a fairly useless website was created, but there’s no evidence that anyone has since benefited from any practical assistance.

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Nick Broomfield’s documentary Sarah Palin – You Betcha! has just been broadcast on British television. The film includes some discussion of Palin’s religious background.

Near the start of the programme, Palin’s parents explain to Broomfield that the family had left Roman Catholicism and been re-baptised into the Assemblies of God while Sarah was a child. The reason they did this is not given (and Broomfield doesn’t ask), although it seems likely that social pressure played a role: in Alexandria, Egypt, a former classmate named Yvonne Bashelier claimed that Palin and her friends have a “spiritual bond” through the Assemblies of God:

To go against Sarah would be to go against your church, whether you agree with her or not, and going against your church and your community is a pretty powerful thing… 

As for non-evangelicals:

A lot of it was unspoken pressure. You just got left out of the group. People wouldn’t speak to you, Sarah would encourage other people not to talk to you.

This sets the tone for a brief overview of evangelical beliefs that follows: Bashelier recalls being warned by Palin about how non-believers would “burn in hell”; Phil Munger recounts that Palin had “disclosed” to him that she was a Young Earth Creationist; and Howard Bess – a local retired Baptist pastor who has clashed with Palin – warned that Palin’s religion is that of “apocalyptic  Christians” and that she would have “no bad conscience about triggering a nuclear war”. Palin’s beliefs are also illustrated by the famous footage of her being prayed over by Pastor Thomas Muthee (although not named) and some generic fundamentalist videos (sources are not given).

Broomfield goes on to explain how Palin’s beliefs and church association allegedly played out in her political life:

Sarah supported evangelical groups who disapproved of books on homosexuality being available at the  library. While members of the church burnt and destroyed the books, Sarah tried to have them removed.

This is illustrated by some (again unsourced) footage of an unidentified man burning some unidentifiable books as part of a bonfire, and I found this section of the film troubling. Claims from 2008 that Palin had attempted to have certain books banned failed to withstand scrutiny, and the accusation that members of her church burnt the titles she sought to have removed is, I believe, a new one. Certainly, there have been documented cases of Assemblies of God churches holding book burnings from time to time elsewhere in the USA, but it’s not a common practice and Broomfield fails to show clearly that the same thing happened in Wasilla.

The suspicion that there is some sloppy conflation going on is heightened soon after, when general conservative Christian hostility to homosexuality is illustrated by stock footage of an anti-gay protest by the Westboro Baptist Church. Westboro’s “God Hates Fags” banners have nothing to do with religion in Alaska, yet Broomfield allows images of Westboro Baptist signs to fade into an image of Palin holding a gun. Broomfield speaks to gay activists in Wasilla who have undoubtedly suffered from religiously-inspired homophobic abuse, but the imagery here is simply misleading.

Later in the programme, Broomfield trails Palin to a “Women of Joy” Christian women’s conference in Oklahoma, and the camera captures another speaker at the event railing against abortion and homosexuality. For some unaccountable reason, this section also includes Broomfield indulging in a witless stunt involving a megaphone.

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From mass-murderer Anders Breivik’s “manifesto“:

I had the privilege of meeting one of the greatest living war heroes of Europe at the time, a Serbian crusader and war hero who had killed many Muslims in battle. Due to EU persecution for alleged crimes against Muslims he was living at one point in Liberia. I visited him in Monrovia once, just before the founding session in London, 2002.

As has been widely discussed, Breivik claims to have been part of a wider anti-Islam “resistance” movement, and to have had a “mentor” in the UK using the name “Richard the Lionhearted”.

I’ve treated these stories sceptically, but the the NRK (Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation) has now reported that, according to police, Breivik’s passport shows that he did indeed visit Liberia for a week in April 2002, and left via the Ivory Coast. The NRK notes that Serbian mercenaries were present in Liberia in 2002; it’s also worth noting that weapons were being smuggled from Serbia to Liberia during this period.

Of course, the fact that Breivik may have met some troubling individuals in Liberia ten years ago is still a long way from showing that his massacre was some sort of conspiracy. However, the presence of a 23-year-old Norwegian civilian in the middle of an African civil war is an odd enough story in itself – and suggests that there are people out there who could fill in some gaps about Breivik’s past.

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