Bartholomew's Notes

Policy Exchange wanted £453,577 plus VAT for costs; settled for £20,000

The most recent episode of the BBC documentary series See You in Court has an interesting segment on the North London Central Mosque’s libel case against Policy Exchange. This is a subject I’ve blogged on a number of times: in 2007 Policy Exchange produced a report alleging that a number of mosques,  including the NLCM, were selling extremist literature. Policy Exchange provided BBC Newsnight with receipts to back up its claim, but Newsnight was able to show that some of these receipts were forgeries. A follow-up in Private Eye pointed out that in some cases the presence of extremist literature could be verified independently, although it didn’t mention the NLCM in its report (it should be noted that no-one is accusing Policy Exchange of creating the forgeries: rather, it seems that Policy Exchange was ripped off by unnamed research assistants who then left the country).

The NLCM sued for libel in 2009, but the case was thrown out. Policy Exchange crowed:

The Trustees of Policy Exchange are delighted to report that Mr Justice Eady yesterday struck out the claim brought against us by the North London Central Mosque.

…The High Court made a further Order that £75,000 of those costs be paid by North London Central Mosque within 28 days.

I must confess that I assumed the case had been thrown out because Policy Exchange had produced some new valid evidence. However, See You in Court explains that this was not the case, and that Policy Exchange had simply relied on a technicality: because the mosque was an unincorporated association, it did not have sufficient legal personality to be defamed. Further, there is no bookshop at the mosque: there is only a private library, and according to mosque’s lawyers the extremist materials mentioned by Policy Exchange “were not the sort of books our client would want on their premises at all.”

Appeals rumbled on until late last year, and Policy Exchange eventually published a short clarification on its website (somewhat gracelessly in the form of a gif file). Andrew Gilligan reported in November:

Policy Exchange emphasises that it has not apologised to the North London Central Mosque and that the mosque has been forced to pay them substantial costs, believed to be in the region of £100,000. It says:

“Policy Exchange is pleased to report that the libel action brought by the North London Central Mosque (NLCM) against it over its report The Hijacking of British Islam has now ended, following the dismissal of NLCM’s appeal against the order of Mr Justice Eady. NLCM has paid a substantial contribution towards Policy Exchange’s costs… Policy Exchange has not apologised to NLCM for the publication of its report.”

However, according to a discussion shown in See You in Court (including a shot of the agreement document), the amount the mosque agreed to pay was just £20,000 – far short of the £75,000 costs from the 2009 case, let alone what may have been ratcheted up from the appeals that followed. Policy Exchange’s lawyers had presented a cost schedule of £453,577 plus VAT. Where did Gilligan get his “£100,000” figure from?

As I noted in previous blog entries, the Policy Exchange report was temperately written, with a valid point to make: it gave a number of other mosques a clean bill of health, and it identified the problem as being a Saudi imposition rather than as some sort of exposure of the “real” Islam. It’s a shame that the receipts fiasco (which also resulted in an apology to the Al-Manaar Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre) undermined its credibility.

One libel action that won’t be featuring on See You in Court is Policy Exchange’s case against Newsnight. Dean Godson, a research director at Policy Exchange, had defended the receipts’ genuineness, and he had promised to pursue the matter “relentlessly, to trial or capitulation”. Alas, there was no trial, and no capitulation.

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Last month, Jim Bakker wrote on his blog:

On New Year’s Eve 2010, God showed me that the coming month of March would be a “Major March”.  A time of major upheaval but also a time of extreme answers to prayers and blessing for Gods people. In addition to the New Year’s Eve warning, God again brought a warning  while taping  our television broadcast, that a 9.0 magnitude earthquake was coming, this was a week before the earthquake hit Japan. We are now witnessing the apocalyptic events in Japan that were undoubtedly a part of both of those warnings.  More earthquakes and major events are coming to Japan very soon. California and the area from Illinois and Missouri to Arkansas will have major events in the future.  Keep you eyes on the Ring of Fire.

On July 12, 2005, God showed me New Orleans under water.  Forty-one days later, on August 29, 2005, hurricane Katrina hit.

In 1999, God showed me 31 things that will come to pass shortly and most already have.

Then, weirdly:

…I do not claim to be a prophet…

Bakker, of course, is to most people simply a figure of fun: an archetypal Elmer Gantry, forever discredited by his sexual indiscretion, lavish lifestyle, and conviction and imprisonment for fraud (not to mention his kitschy religious aesthetic). However, he has been making something of a comeback with help from Rick Joyner. In a blog entry from last week, Bakker discussed his TV show:

…Rick Joyner is with us this week, and he emphasized that even in God’s judgment, He always desires to show His mercy.

…Rick went on to say there will be a shaking first.  The economic unraveling is the grace from God to give us a reset where we can start again.  There will be a period of time when our dollar won’t be worth anything, but we have another source.  We have a kingdom that is above all of our natural circumstances and every Christian is going to  have to come to the kingdom.

Rick said he talked to Bob Jones (another Prophet) the Sunday after the big quake hit in Japan, and Bob said  “it’s coming to California.”  This confirms what the Lord showed me in the “31 Things” he gave me in 1999.  When the Lord speaks something like that, He will usually confirm it with two or three witnesses.

Joyner, in turn, has been promoting Bakker in a series of fear-mongering and apocalyptic videos, as noted by Right Wing Watch.

Their alliance is actually long-standing; Joyner’s Morningstar Ministries also runs Heritage International Ministries, which controls the Heritage Grand Hotel at the site of Bakker’s ruined Heritage USA project. The hotel was recently the location for an investiture ceremony of a strange “chivalric order” of which Joyner is a member, along with William “Jerry” Boykin.

Of course, if you’re constantly firing off general prophecies of doom, you’re bound to score the occasional hit. The misses can be filed away: in 1998 Bakker published Prosperity and the Coming Apocalypse, in which he warned that the millennium bug (Y2K) may well “be a highly plausible explanation for what the Bible refers to as the black horse of famine and economic chaos”.

And speaking of dodgy prophecies, it’s now more than two years since David Wilkerson last promised us “fires raging through New York City” that “will engulf the whole megaplex, including areas of New Jersey and Connecticut” as God destroys “the secular foundations”.

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Patrick Mercer MP on Wightman: “Dominic and Vigil have been extremely helpful to me”

Wightman on Anne Milton MP: “My local supporters (including the MP) want [Tim] Ireland downed”

Nadine Dorries MP on Wightman: “Very interesting”

Note: several sources quoted and cited in this post have been taken from material published on this new blog post by Tim Ireland; I have marked these with an asterisk

As I have previously blogged, in 2009 I had an encounter with a man named Dominic Wightman, a self-styled private expert on counter-terrorism who had previously run an organisation called the “VIGIL Network” (or “Vigil”). Wightman was particularly close to Patrick Mercer MP; early in 2007 Mercer wrote in a letter that

… Dominic and Vigil have been extremely helpful to me from my task as Shadow Minister for Security. They have provided me with a number of very useful leads and between us we have managed to put pressure upon the nation’s enemies and secured a number of arrests. I shall certainly continue to use any guidance that Vigil gives me.*

Mercer had introduced Wightman to police at New Scotland Yard (see pic below), and he was probably responsible for an appearance that Wightman made on Newsnight late in 2006. Wightman lives in Surrey, and by his own account he is also involved with local political activism there and is friendly with his local MP, Anne Milton.

Mercer’s letter was a brush-off to an ex-employee of VIGIL who wanted Mercer’s help in recovering unpaid wages; she had written to him explaining the situation:

In December 2005 after completing my MBA I was put in contact with Dominic Wightman… [He] was starting a new charity organisation called VIGIL, which would help anybody involved with tracking terrorist organisation by providing a free translation service to them. The charity was to be funded by a Tory Grandee – Lord Michael Ashcroft and two other establishment figures, who were I was told friends of Dominic’s late father.

…During my 5 months of employment I never got paid and I finally resigned in June 2006 as I could no longer trust Dominic Wightman’s reassurances and him blaming others for the lack of payment. I had kept going for so long as new organisations often have a shaky start but mainly because I strongly believed in the cause…. Dominic even sent a fake email (copy attached) from a sub-contractor claiming to have been paid.

…I have all the email correspondence to support the above history, which made it very easy for me to present my case to the Employment Tribunal. As detailed in the enclosed judgement, I was eventually awarded a total of £14,174.45…

…Everybody was led to believe that Lord Ashcroft was the principal financial backer and probably the main reason why questions were not raised much sooner.

I hope your influence may help put pressure on Dominic Wightman to finally pay me what I am owed…*

It should be emphasised that the author was not just some disgruntled ex-employee sounding off with wild accusations; she had already won an employment tribunal. And she does not just complain about financial mismanagement: there’s a direct accusation of duplicity.

Mercer – who is today Chairman of the House of Commons Sub-Committee on Counter-Terrorism – should have been alarmed; instead, though, he merely re-affirmed his confidence in VIGIL and his willingness to be guided by Wightman in matters of public interest. Given Mercer’s habit of briefing the media with stories about terrorism that sometimes crumble under scrutiny (“HIV bombs“, for example), this raises further serious concerns about his judgement.

Mercer was still having friendly communication with Wightman in 2008*, and although they have since (apparently) severed contact, Mercer sees no need to explain why or to put the record straight. Lord Ashcroft is not interested in explaining his association, either.

By coincidence, Wightman lives close to the blogger Tim Ireland; Tim and I both met him early in 2009, after Tim uncovered that a Sun front-page splash about a terror plot against Alan Sugar had been based on  evidence concocted by Glen Jenvey. Jenvey had also been associated with VIGIL, and Wightman met us to explain that VIGIL had collapsed because of Jenvey and because of the machinations of a university lecturer. He urged us to expose this lecturer, who he claimed had a hold over Mercer because of connections at Mercer’s constituency office. After a few months, though, it transpired that Wightman was manipulating us: the lecturer had found out about Wightman’s dishonesty, and this was the actual reason why VIGIL had collapsed. Wightman gave himself away by creating a pseudonymous document with details about Tim’s home and such, and claiming that the lecturer was behind it; the police traced it back to Wightman.

At this point, Wightman decided to spin the whole thing as a political dispute, and he wrote to Adrian Morgan (a former associate who has since repudiated the man and his methods):

Tim Ireland lives 3 villages from me and my local supporters (including the MP) want Ireland downed. He has already admitted to me I am the sole reason he’s not written on hs blog for 2 months. He is a vicious bully and I will not sit back and get slaughtered by him without telling the world how to silence a big bully, how I did it, that I am not particularly proud of how I did it but that yes I did it. There MUST BE a mix here of eating humble pie and sabre-rattling or I will be walked over. I must also bring the right wing blog alliance on my side and to do this I need to show that I have been capable of bringing down the most famous left wing blogger, albeit temporarily, that ever existed in the UK.

The MP whom Wightman claims as his supporter is Anne Milton (she was also Tim’s MP at the time Wightman wrote this, although there has been a boundary change since); Tim writes today that

It is a day after she was presented with evidence that Dominic Wightman claimed to be acting on her behalf, and she has not yet deemed it necessary to contradict the man.

Wightman’s actions since we discovered he was a liar have consisted of long tirades on his blog, and the creation of goading and abusive attack websites containing disinformation. In particular, he has attempted to spread the idea that Tim is a stalker (building on a claim made by some right-wingers who dislike being called to account, as I dealt with here). Another person associated with VIGIL was the cyber-thug Charlie Flowers, who publicised Tim’s home address and expressed malicious intent towards his family in an attempt to intimidate; Flowers later realised he’d been manipulated, but he has pressed on independently to save face rather than do the decent thing (Flowers has since turned on me for daring to object).

Back in 2005, Tim discovered that two activists working for Milton had been using the internet to smear a political opponent prior to an election; these activists were themselves standing as councillors, and so Jonathan Lord, now MP for Woking and at that time Chairman of the Guildford Conservative Association, decided to deal with it with a discrete word to them in private rather than by dismissing them for bringing the party into disrepute.

However, Wightman’s efforts to “bring the right wing blog alliance on my side” has for the most part failed – probably because his idea of making an alliance means manipulation and duplicity rather than honest discussion. There has been one exception, though, and it’s a third MP: Nadine Dorries, who used her “70 per cent fiction” blog to publicise Wightman’s site as “very interesting”.

FOOTNOTE: Soon after Wightman was made bankrupt – which I did not know about at the time – he told me that he intended to move his assets into someone else’s name and file for bankruptcy in the autumn of 2009. This was so that he would be able to attack various targets without fear of libel proceedings – although those attacks never in fact materialised. A year ago, Wightman dismissed the tribunal on a blog, in which he posed as a black woman from Luton interviewing him; he declared it was “a highly dubious judgement by a highly dubious tribunal” and attacked the character of his former employee, claiming that she hadn’t deserved to be paid (he also wrote that in an email to me). This is obviously nonsense: the tribunal awarded her more than £14,000, which represents more than six months of salary. Why did he continue to employ her for so long if her work was non-existent? Why did he go to ground rather than attend the tribunal and offer evidence in his own defence?

Wightman has since thought better of publicising his contempt for the tribunal in this way, and he has now deleted the posting.

Curiously, three months after Wightman declared bankruptcy, a short-lived outfit appeared called Wightman Parker Smith Gold (or WPS Gold), operating from the same London address as at least one of Wightman’s previous businesses and looking to trade in gold and diamonds.

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Back in November, I received a typically self-debasing comment from cyber-bully Charlie Flowers, this time hiding his shame behind the pseudonym “Righteous Death Angel”:

So your boss spent years stalking people and then one day he got turned over by people who didn’t give a damn? Deal with it, bizzotch. What you gonna do about it Commie Boy? Feds are after all your friends and soon they after you too…
you should be worried.

By “my boss”, Flowers is making a goading Tim Ireland, a blogger whom Flowers had attempted to intimidate into silence. When Flowers realised he’d been manipulated into doing this by someone else (and – worse – had got his friends to join in under a false premise), Flowers retroactively turned to the stalker smear to explain himself. I’ve been critical of Flowers ever since, and he’d rather believe that it’s because I’m either working for someone or because I’m a secret communist, rather than because I’m not prepared to look the other way. Flowers has been generally abusive my direction ever since, both in his own name and while cowering behind fake identities (most recently here).

But what about this very strange Americanised affectation of referring to “Feds”? The word recently turned up again in a comment left in March on the Facebook page of the “Save Masjid Tawhid Campaign“. This is an nasty Islamist Facebook page dedicated to attacking Usama Hasan, a British Muslim who has received threats and abuse for having argued at the mosque that Islam is compatible with evolution. The comment was posted by someone using the name “Commanding Good”:

ehhhmmm…. guys, be careful, this bunch are a Met Police unit, and they dont play. Cheerleaders, Blackeyes, NiceOnes, all feds, with a license to mess us up and no comeback :/ avoid them and block them!!

“Commanding Good”‘s Facebook profile url has the name “MindfulSalafi”. “Cheerleaders, Blackeyes, NiceOnes” are all groups that Flowers is involved with.

On 7 April, “Commanding Good” made a new post to the site:

?:0 “THE EAST LONDON THREE FAITHS’ FORUM – A Discussion on Science & Religion 8pm – Thursday, 14 April at the Al-Tawhid Mosque, 80 High Road Leyton E15 2BP. All welcome. No charge. Light refreshments.”

He expounded further in the comments (which are only visible if you sign in) :

They’re at it again!

and

OK daft question though… who’s going and will it be interesting? I wouldnt want to see fitna in the house of Allaah, obv.

It goes without saying that the people behind the Islamist website are deeply unpleasant – as well as the attacks on Hasan, the site’s controller has posted a crudely abusive and sexualised insult aimed at one of the members of British Muslims for Secular Democracy.

However, it is also the case that Flowers is posing as “Commanding Good” to manipulate the extremists who run the site in the hope that they will show up at the mosque and create a scene (“They’re at it again” discounts the possibility that he just wants to advertise the event in the hope some extremists will come and learn the error of their ways). The use of the word “feds”, the close attention to “Cheerleaders, Blackeyes, NiceOnes” (no-one is that interested), and the name “Mindful Salafi” all point in his direction; Flowers (or an associate) has a YouTube channel called “SalafiTV”. The last sentence primarily suggests backside-covering should things get out of hand.

Of course, Flowers will claim that since his aim is to entrap and expose extremists, anyone who objects to what he’s doing must therefore be in favour of the extremists – even though it’s obvious that these foolish antics are about thrill-seeking rather than anything that can be called political activism. The “Terror Target Sugar” fiasco should have taught him that these things tend to go horribly wrong, and are utterly counter-productive. He’s not just playing with the extremists, either: his silly games risk making life more difficult for Hasan, and may even undermine real police work.

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Norwegian television news show TV 2 Nyhetene has a report on Alan Lake, the British businessman connected with the English Defence League. For the first time, Lake admits to financing the organisation:

I mean, I have given some money to help some EDL things happen.

Lake describes Islamists who make provocative and inflammatory protests in the UK as “seditious” and tells us that he would be “happy to execute people like that”. He adds that “I suspect its going to take the loss of a few countries” in Europe “to actually wake other people up”.

There’s also input from Nachum Shifren, the Californian “Surfing Rabbi”:

Alan has had a very decisive role in working with me and people in the United States.

I blogged on Shrifen’s association with the EDL here and here, noting his anti-gay views; my posts drew critical comment from Lake himself.

Lake is of interest to Norwegian television because of his links to Kent Ekeroth, the Swedish nationalist politician; Lake describes him as a “good friend”. Lake also says that he wishes to return to Sweden to give another talk “now that I’ve moved on to the next level.”

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From an old advert on Facebook, dating from 2008

Investment Opportunity – up to 2000% return in the next 4 years

On September 7, 2007, Hurricane Felix made landfall on the North Atlantic region of Nicaragua. The hurricane’s devastating winds and rain leveled the old-growth tropical forest on a gigantic scale.

Because of the extensive damage, the Nicaraguan government issued emergency contracts for the Timber Recovery Project to private sector companies such as Valcor S.A., which was chosen to head the recovery efforts within a large segment of the disaster area. Valcor is uniquely suited to this task since they own one of the largest sawmill and lumber processing companies in Nicaragua and because they have timber and mining concession agreements in place with all of the municipalities involved, approved by the government.

…Please be aware that there are only a limited number of shares available at the class A level (25% of profits) as we have acquired several large investment companies into the project, totaling $40 million at this point. We have also sold approximately $1 million in individual shares.

Please visit our hurricane relief website at http://www.hurricanefelixhelp.com/photos.html

Dan Chambers
Premier Investment
www.valcorinvestment.com

Chambers made the posting to Facebook in his own name, and Costa Rican contact details are given. Although the advert promises returns over “the next 4 years”, the company has since disappeared and the links are dead.

So, did anyone manage to get rich quick from the scheme? Details are scarce, although some googling suggests not. And according to a news report in El Nuevo Diario dating from August 2010, the director of Valcor – a certain Val Pacheco – appears to have got into some legal difficulties around accusations of money laundering (the report mentions “Velcor”, but other sites show this is a misspelling of “Valcor”).

Of course, none of this is Chambers’ fault – he was just a manager – but I’d have been embarrassed to have been involved in any capacity. Perhaps Chambers had better luck the following summer, when he was advertising as a gold bullion seller on Tradekey.

This is of some interest to me; back in 2009 I received a couple of goading comments from Costa Rica from someone using the name “Daniela Chambers”. Both appeared on posts about Dominic Wightman (who sometimes uses the name “Dominic Whiteman”). In the first post, I explained Wightman’s attempts to manipulate Tim Ireland and me into attacking a person against whom he has a grudge. Here was “Daniela”‘s response:

It looks like you have been played, Richard. I wonder what Whiteman found out about you when he was collaborating with you?

The second post concerned a list of abusive questions that had been sent to Tim Ireland, and which had a Costa Rican phone number appended. I showed how the questions looked very similar to an essay written by Wightman, which Wightman had posted to his own site after Tim had received the questions but before Tim had written about them on his blog. “Daniela” had a theory:

The similarities would be explained by Ireland dropping a key stroke logger onto Wightman’s computer at some point when they were communicating and grabbing a sneak copy of the article, which was presumably sent to Wightman first. Or maybe it is those cheerleaders again messing with your leftie minds ; )

“Daniela” also gave an email address, which was very similar to Dan Chambers’ personal email address (both use only the same part of the surname, followed by the same two initials). A look at Dan Chambers’ Facebook contacts, meanwhile, lists Wightman; Wightman was also advertising on Tradekey as a bullion trader around the same time as Chambers (this was not long after Wightman had declared bankruptcy).

I’ve emailed Dan Chambers to ask if he was “Daniela”, but I have received no reply. Alternative explanations are (a) someone else created the “Daniela Chambers” identity, using Dan Chambers as a model; or (b) there is really a “Daniela Chambers” living in Costa Rica, with a similar email address to that of Dan Chambers, and an independent association with Wightman.

UPDATE: Adrian Morgan has left a comment below, with further information about Wightman’s links to Chambers. Adrian used to be associated with Wightman’s website, but he split from Wightman when he discovered that Wightman was dishonest. Adrian and I probably disagree on some matters of politics, but we both agree that one should either argue openly or agree to disagree. The idea of using sockpuppets or manipulating the internet to disseminate false information would be repellent – both as a matter of ethics and as a matter of personal dignity.

UPDATE 2: Chambers’ involvement with Wightman is also discussed in this new post by Tim Ireland. He quotes an email which Wightman sent to Adrian in September 2009, which includes the following:

I am going to do the following:

…6. Tim Ireland take-down (Sunday – a day before he releases a vicious take-down on me) Author: Dan Chambers, a pal…

Wightman soon after published an attack on Tim, which for some reason took the form of Wightman being interviewed by a fictitious lawyer from Venezuela named Olivia James. As Adrian notes below, the name “oliviaj772” was also used to post videos of Wightman to Youtube; the YouTube channel gives Costa Rica as the location.

Wightman has also responded to the above on his own website:

The little known blogger Richard Bartholomew (Bartholomew’s Notes on Religion) has been at it again – trying to stir up trouble. This time Bartholomew smears a friend of mine who lives in Costa Rica. The bemused friend happened to chat with me over the weekend and asked me who this Bartholomew was. I had to inform him that Bartholomew is a deceitful little left wing blogger who makes John Merrick seem kissable; that Bartholomew is my electronic stalker’s lackey and that he writes a blog about religious nuts but that it is fatally flawed as he is too scared to mention Islamists. “Ah,” replied my friend and so we continued chatting about Tamarindo surf.

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Richard Silverstein writes:

NOTE: Yerushalmi has withdrawn his lawsuit threat in a note he sent to my counsel.

The lawyer David Yerushalmi had threatened to sue Silverstein for libel, writing to his lawyer that:

When he first attacked me personally and stated that I was a fascist, racist, and Kahanist, I ignored [his statements]… Unfortunately, your client has republished the original articles via links in a most recent piece stating that I am a white supremacist. I might still have ignored this except for the fact that it has now concretely and specifically injured me in my legal profession in Arizona. I have now lost an African American client who was prepared to retain my firm but for your clients defamatory publications, because he could not afford to be associated with someone accused of such beliefs even though he knows I do not hold these beliefs. Much of his business is in public relations and this charge by your client was for him too much to sustain.

…The suit will be brought in Arizona.  An interesting and related case is Yetman v. English, 168 Ariz. 71, 811 P.2d 323 (1991).

I certainly understand your client will raise the standard First Amendment defenses: opinion, hyperbole, no actual malice.  If we get past these, your client will have the opportunity to test “truth” as a defense.

I’ve blogged on Yerushalmi previously; his clients include Pamela Geller (who also likes to make legal threats while accusing Muslims of “lawfare”), and in 2008 he was involved with the absurd “Mapping Shariah” project. Yetman v. English refers to case in which an Arizona representative had accused a political opponent of being a “communist” over his approach to a rural zoning change; it’s odd to see Yerushalmi rely on such as a precedent, given that accusations of secret communism are a central strategy of so many of his activist allies.

I’m generally cautious with allegations of racism: too often, such accusations end up getting bogged down in how racism should be defined. Opinion is cheap, and people can make up their own minds over what may have motivated someone to write something or to follow a particular course of action. The accusation was also made against Yerushalmi by Mother Jones.

In his own defence, Silverstein draws attention to one particular passage by Yerushalmi:

…Our constitutional republic was specifically designed to insulate our national leaders from the masses,democracy has seeped up through the cracks and corroded everything we once deemed sacred about our political order. Prior to the Civil War, the electorate, essentially white Christian men, had access to local government. It was here, where men shared an intimacy born of family ties, shared religious beliefs, and common cultural signposts, that representative government was meant to touch our daily lives. With the social and cultural revolution which followed the emancipation, man’s relationship to political order was radically nationalized and democratized.

…Raw or radical democracy where all men and all ideas and all cultures are deemed equal and given equal voice. That is of course the agenda of the Left…

Such views appear in a rambling essay called “On Race: A Tentative Discussion”, which used to be on Yerushalmi’s Saneworks site but which has since been reposted elsewhere (without his permission). Some highlights:

…Now, if skin color, disease, body shape and size, athleticism all have a biological basis, why is it that intelligence or predilection to violence might not also have genetic bases. In fact, there is enormous evidence to the contrary. For example, at the extremes, we know that mentally retarded people and geniuses were “born” that way.

…But if standardized testing suggests a racial component to IQ, if the New York City and national murder statistics suggest there is a racial component to murder, why is that necessarily a bad racism? With all of the liberal talk of evolution and biology, why do people find it so difficult to confront the facts that some races perform better in sports, some better in mathematical problem solving, some better in language, some better in Western societies and some better in tribal ones?

…There is a reason the founding fathers did not give women or black slaves the right to vote. You might not agree or like the idea but this country’s founders, otherwise held in the highest esteem for their understanding of human nature and its affect on political society, certainly took it seriously.

…The fact that a retarded person can vote [i.e., literacy tests have been outlawed] but a child cannot is not sustainable and eventually the ACLU will successfully challenge this baseless age discrimination. Just like the laws against “consensual” sex with minors, or animals, or polygamy will eventually be challenged and held to be unconstitutional in the same way sodomy has been transformed into a “right,” when it once was an absolute abomination to the vast, vast majority of Americans… When Process and Rights replace the moral compass supplied by this country’s Judeo-Christian foundings, nothing, absolutely nothing can be morally repugnant anymore, at least not in the eyes of the law.

…If, on the other hand, science, meaning liberal scientists with the Elites’ agenda firmly in hand, don’t allow for an inquiry into the differences between peoples, races and sexes, and scientists carefully guard the boundaries that keep science in control, democracy and the Open Society, multiculturalism and the remainder of the trendsetters on the way to an amorphous World State, remain unchallenged.

One wonders what some of Yerushalmi’s clients might make of such “tentative” ruminations, even without whatever label Silverstein or anyone else may have given to them.

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Some good news for Pat Robertson and the Christian Broadcasting Network:

Ivory Coast: Good News During Civil War
By CBN Ivory Coast

…With strong support from pastors of various denominations in Ivory Coast, CBN began to make preparation for an evangelistic media campaign that would take place during the Christmas holidays. What no one expected though, was that the country would erupt into civil war.

….CBN WorldReach Director Peter Darg writes …”With a complete curfew from sun down to sun up, everybody is trying to race around to get to work, school or shopping and mostly creating massive traffic tie ups. After dark, everyone is at home watching TV, so the blitz (media campaign)timing is perfect in this regard (imagine what the USA TV networks would give to force everyone in the country to be in their homes every night watching the TV or face being shot).”

…CBN is also providing a series of 20 half-hour radio programs for the FM station in Abijan, Radio Frequence Vie. These radio programs are based on Pat Robertson’s best selling book and TV series Answers.

As I’ve blogged previously, Robertson sees the conflict in Ivory Coast in terms of a religious war between Muslim “rebels” and a Christian president: back in January, CBN ran a piece explaining that in the recent election Gbagbo “only lost to the Muslim challenger because of voter fraud” as concocted by “Saudi Arabia” and “Muslims in France”. The piece came with a softball interview with Gbagbo, which was “broadcast on Ivorian National Television”. Robertson’s version of the story has also been picked up by WorldNetDaily, which sees a United Nations conspiracy at work. The view that the west ought to continue to support Gbagbo will doubtless be strengthened by the recent massacre in the town of Duekoue, which appears to have been perpetrated by soldiers loyal to president-elect Alassane Ouattara; however, Gbagbo’s troops are also responsible for large numbers of deaths.

CBN’s support for Gbagbo is also a matter of self-interest:

It all started a little more than a year ago when the First Lady of Ivory Coast visited The Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) in Virginia Beach, Virginia on a special mission. Mrs. Somone Gbagbo, the wife of Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo, wanted CBN to provide Christian TV programs for her country. In return she would guarantee that the programs would air on national television. To respond to the immediate need, episodes of The 700 Club were regularly dubbed into French and shipped for broadcast. The goal, however, was to have an African program that would be tailored for the region with French African hosts. Within a few months, Raymond Kauffee from Cameroon and Macy Domingo from Ivory Coast began hosting Le Club 700 that now airs in French speaking countries throughout the region.

The phrase “the wife” should actually be “a wife” – he has two of them.

(Hat tip: Terry Krepel at Media Matters. Incidentally, Peter Darg previously appeared on this blog in 2006)

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There were few surprises in Louis Theroux: America’s Most Hated Family In Crisis, last night’s follow-up to Theroux’s 2007 documentary on the Westboro Baptist Church. The “crisis” refers to a number of young adult members who have either left or been expelled from the church: Theroux meets a couple of these, including Lauren Drain, who has been disowned by her father Steve Drain. Lauren explains that her father used to be in a rock band and had taught philosophy and western civilization in college before becoming involved with the church; Westboro Baptist is where he’s now “manifesting his ego” and can have “power over his family”. The main point of interest for Theroux was the psychological efforts of the parents in rejecting their children:

My return visit to the Phelps’ had convinced me that they were embarked on an eccentric mission to live life in denial of the most basic human emotions. Stifling their own feelings, they felt entitled, in fact compelled, to trample on those of other people.

Fred Phelps himself appears only briefly, giving a sermon fulminating against Jews (“these modern Jews have the stinking smell of the criminal Barabbas about their person, and they have the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ on their hands.”); seeing Theroux and the camera crew, he mutters to someone, “Those guys are on the loose, sallying forth. You’ve got to get rid of them”.

The main change since 2007 seems to be that the group has become more urgently apocalyptic, believing that Obama is the anti-Christ and that they will soon be forced to leave the USA: when that happens, they will await the end times either in Jerusalem or in “pink caves” in Jordan. And while some members raised in the church are leaving, the group does continue to attract converts: at the back of the church Theroux meets Jack, an earnest Asian-American from San Francisco who is attending worship meetings with a view to eventually being accepted for membership.

One of the Westboro members also reminds us that a few months ago the church had held a Koran-burning; although not mentioned in the programme, this was after Pastor Terry Jones had reneged on his promise to burn the book (in April 2010, Westboro and Jones’s Dove World Outreach Church held a joint protest, although details are no longer on the Dove website). The stunt did not generate a great deal of media publicity, nor appeals from government officials – and there were no related outbursts of violence in Afghanistan. Now, what conclusion might we draw from that…?

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Pastor Terry Jones has forced himself back into the news, with fatal protests in Kandahar following a Koran-burning at his church in Florida. He is also once again drumming up publicity for himself by announcing that he intends to join a protest being organised by another group – a few months ago he did this with three groups based in the UK (the English Defence League, the National Front, and England is Ours), and this time it’s with a group called the “Order of the Dragon”, which is organising a protest in Dearborn. Arab American News notes:

Despite strong opposition, extremist pastor Terry Jones still plans to protest in Dearborn later this month.

Founders of a northern Michigan group named Order of the Dragon, and organizers of the anti-Sharia law protest scheduled for Apr. 22 at the Islamic Center of America say the event is nothing more than a political demonstration.

The group, which has no more than five members according to Fox 2 News, released the following statement by email to The Arab?American News.

“This protest was formed by a few concerned citizens that want to ban ‘foreign law, legal code, or system’ meaning any law, rule, legal code, or system of jurisdiction outside of any state or territory of the United States.’ We are protesting global jihad caused by our Middle East policy, and wish to expose some Israeli/Palestinian lies that we feel need to be approached…to move forward.”

The “Order of the Dragon” (OOTD) has a website here; the protest is also billed as being against the “Palastinian [sic] Wall of Lies”. The site also has a section called “Bands for the Cause”, where we can listen to the song Mosque of Terror by the band “Crude Legacy”, along with items by Chris Christy and Brian Jess. A second website, called the “New Order of the Dragon”, appears to be an older version of the same group; Christy is listed as “treasurer”, and with Frank Fiorello as president; Fiorello also heads the “Crude Legacy” band. According to the site:

One of the Original Founding Members and President of the Dragons. He is a promoter with the DRCP ARMY a Detroit based underground punk/metal movement.

“DRCP Army records” is Crude Legacy’s label.

Further:

The Order Of The Dragon is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that relies on donations to continue its work to help Americans from harming changes that are occuring at an alarming rate, by Secular Proggresive movements and by Facist Islam’s Stealth Jihad. If you have questions before you make a donation, please write or call the number below.

Fiorello has also created a Facebook page to promote the protest, billed as the “OOTD RALLY Anti Sharia & Jihad Protest”. It’s also featured on Jones’ website, along with a letter from Fiorello:

It is necessary that we set very clear lines for Muslims that are here in America . They are welcome to be here. They are welcome to worship. They are welcome to build mosques. But we do expect them to honor and obey our Constitution. If they desire to change our Constitution, in other words to institute Sharia, then these Muslims are no longer welcome in our country.

Now is the time that we make a very, very clear statement to radical Islam.

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