Bartholomew's Notes

Plastering stickers around an area is a cheap and easy way to generate publicity, and in London the strategy is particularly associated with various Islamist groups. The appearance of Islamist anti-gay stickers in Whitechapel has garnered some media attention: the stickers show a rainbow with a cross through it, on which is written “gay free zone”. Above the symbol is written  “ARISE AND WARN [EMQ 74:2]”, and below is written “AND FEAR ALLAH: VERILY ALLAH IS SEVERE IN PUNISHMENT [EMQ: 59:7]”. No further information is given. “EMQ” refers to a particular translation, called the “English Maariful Quran”.

The stickers were previously spotted in Whitechapel in October [UPDATE: and also in Stoke Newington – H/T to a reader], and before that in Nottingham last summer; the photographer “Tash” noted them on Indymedia here, and the Pink Paper reported that

A complaint of homophobia has been made to Nottingham Police after a group of men were seen putting up anti-Pride posters which read Gay Free Zone in the city centre.

The stickers and posters were put up just before Nottingham’s Pride festival, circa 31 July, and a member of the public has now made an official complaint to police.

One report concerning the new incident has quote from Rainbow Hamlets, an LGBT forum in Tower Hamlets, purporting to have “evidence” that the stickers were “likely” to have created by a group such as the English Defence League; what this evidence might be is mysterious, and the above would appear to rule out the possibility altogether.

The Nottingham police got as far as forwarding “one sticker and one poster to the Crown Prosecution Service to establish whether this material amounts to a criminal offence”; there are no details of any follow-up, although the police in London appear to be taking the matter more seriously: according to the Evening Standard, “Police were examining CCTV and forensic evidence today as they hunted the culprits”.

UPDATE: Apparently cyber-vigilante Charlie Flowers of “NiceOnesUK” and the “Cheerleaders” is claiming to know the name and address of the person responsible the stickers, although no evidence is forthcoming. Doubtless he’s in full self-righteous thrill mode as he harasses some hapless Islamist, whether the right one or the wrong one, and tries to spin his supposed inside information into proof that he’s not someone who also harasses innocent people.

It should be recalled that Flowers and his associates took revenge on a vulnerable adult with mental health problems who had recently joined an extremist group by outing him as gay on an Islamic website, even though this could have led to the man and his partner coming to physical harm.

Flowers is himself not adverse to using stickers to send a message to those he dislikes: the “Cheerleaders” Facebook page used to carry a video of an “anti-extremist” “sticker raid” on the Muslim World League offices in Goodge Street, London.

UPDATE 2: The Islamist named by Flowers is based in east London, and he has a website which includes a post from April 2010 (on the evils of voting) that, like the stickers, begins with the phrase “Arise and Warn [EMQ 74:2]”. While “Arise and Warn” is used as a rhetorical opening on a number of Islamic websites, his is the only one that follows with the distinctive referencing style. This is suggestive – but no more than that.

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Yesterday evening BBC 3 broadcast The World’s Worst Place to Be Gay?, a documentary about Uganda presented by gay DJ Scott Mills. There are few surprises: gay people are forced to live in slums, rejected by their families and at risk of violence, while a sampling of random interviewees from the street shows a visceral hatred for homosexuals and a wish for their execution (“everything bad should be done to those people”, says one young woman).

Mills also spoke to some of the individuals who are actively promoting anti-gay feeling: Giles Muhame, managing editor of Rolling Stone newspaper; Pastor Solomon Male; and David Bahati MP, author of the notorious Anti-Homosexuality Bill (a bill not unfairly dubbed by critics as the “Kill the Gays Bill”). Muhume is notorious for “outing” homosexuals in his newspaper (although a court injunction recently put a stop to this), and he explained that his paper had got information through having “infiltrated their circles” and by talking to “ex-homosexuals”. Muhame also claimed that stories of attacks on gay people were lies, and (rather unconvincingly) that if his own picture had appeared in the paper he wouldn’t be scared. He added:

We are not policing but we are assisting the police to do their work.

Muhume also told Mills that homosexuality reduces one’s lifespan by 24 years – that particular talking-point comes from Paul Cameron of the Family Research Institute (Cameron has featured on this blog previously).

Pastor Male, meanwhile, was introduced as claiming “he was first to openly come out against gays” – he has appeared on this blog here (it’s perhaps worth noting that Male has deployed accusations of homosexuality against rival pastors). Male’s views, expressed with a smile, are what you would expect: homosexuality is “morally incomprehensible, abominable”; “of course” gay people are as bad as paedophiles; “it is beyond human imagination that people of the same kind can love each other”. When Mills tells Male that he was gay from birth, Male insists that he is saying this “to deceive other people, because you want so many people to come to your ranks”.

Mills then went on to interview David Bahati on the grass outside the Parliament building: he described his proposed Anti-Homosexuality Bill as “a wonderful piece of legislation that will help those who are involved in this behaviour, but also protect those who are not involved in this”. He also claimed that a quote attributed to him about killing homosexuals was a misquote, and that he wants gay people “to come back to normality”. Like Muhame, Bahati further claimed that accounts of abuse and violence against gay people was “planned deliberate propaganda by the gay movement… I’ve not seen any person being harassed”. As for parents chasing away their gay children, “I’ve not heard of that in this society”. Bahati explained that once the Bill was passed, parents would be expected to report their children to the police, and then “the law enforcement agencies should take care of that”.

Mills then told Bahati that he is himself gay; Bahati’s first response was awkward, and then became slightly hysterically jocular:

Well, I think  if I had known, it would be a different matter for this interview…. I think it’s not professional, right, to engage in this… If you are we could probably ask our police to check if that’s right [laughs]…. Make sure you are not caught in the act because if you are you will be put in.

Bahati then terminated the interview; Mills tells us Bahati followed up by calling his fixer asking for information, and that police had been sent to a hotel where Bahati incorrectly thought they were staying. Bahati previously featured on this blog here.

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Channel 4’s Dispatches has just broadcast a documentary on hard-line teaching in a Muslim school in the UK and violence in a madrassa attached to a mosque, using covert recording over a two-year period. The programme, entitled Lessons in Hate and Violence, can be seen in the UK here; it forms a follow-up to Dispatches‘ 2007 programme Undercover Mosque (blogged here), and complements a BBC Panorama programme on extremism in some British Muslim schools which went out in November (blogged here).

Much of the programme focused on Darul Uloon al-Islam, a full-time secondary school in Birmingham which has in the past been visited by MPs and various officials. Footage shows an older student leading an assembly as preaching practice, in which he explains that Hindus have no intellect because they “worship cows”, and that they “drink the piss of a cow”. Following the summer holidays, a teacher warns that pupils with “un-Islamic” hairstyles will be trimmed, and the students are told not to integrate: society is “Shaytan”, they should “hate” walking down English streets, and they should “put away” and “forget” non-Muslim friends. Guest speakers are brought in to explain that less rigorous Muslims, defined as having a “less than a fistful” of beard, are of more potential harm than associating with a Jew, and that punishment awaits:

You know when the Angel of Death comes and he rips their soul out. He will give them such a beating that this forked iron rod will enter his body and it will enter every single joint. And then the Angel of Death will twist it and he will twist it and he will twist it. You will feel the pain on that day.

Pupils are also told not to wear trousers that go below the ankles, as this “imitates women”: “that part of your feet will be in the fire of hell”. The programme’s presenter, Tazeen Ahmed, explained that in 2007 the school’s Deputy Headmaster had been recorded in Undercover Mosque giving an anti-integration talk,  after which he had resigned since this was supposedly not in accordance with the school’s principles. The school’s response to the new footage has been to claim that the senior student who had denounced Hindus had been expelled, that certain teachers have been dismissed, and that outside speakers had said things that were not in accordance with the school’s ethos.

The programme also noted that despite the above, the school has been praised by inspectors, who had recorded that “pupils learn about the beliefs and practices of other faiths and are taught to show respect to other world religions”, and that the school was “promoting tolerance and harmony”. The inspectorate’s name appeared on-screen but was not discussed – this was the Bridge Schools Inspectorate, which also featured in the Panorama documentary. BSI deals with a small number of Muslim and Christian schools, and Barry Sheerman MP described it on Panorama as a “sub-system” which had “slipped through the system before anyone noticed what had happened”.

There’s also a brief related discussion of a school called Darululoom London; Ahmed noted a website which appeared to be associated with the school and which promotes segregationist teaching. However, the school insisted there was in fact no connection, and that a teacher named as overseeing the site is in the process of having his name removed.

Another portion of the programme dealt with the Markazi Jamia Mosque in Keighley, where there is a madrassa that appears to be overseen by a Islamic version of Wackford Squeers: the teacher is shown roaming about the room where children are learning the Koran, hitting and kicking cowering pupils more or less at random. At other times, older pupils are shown bullying the younger. The footage was shown to Sir Roger Singleton, author of a report entitled Physical Punishment: Improving Consistency and Protection; he had visited the madrassa as part of his research and he told Ahmed that the footage indicated that he had been misled. As is customary in these programmes, there was the obligatory door-stopping: Ahmed and her camera crew made their way to the mosque to get a response from mosque officials, who quickly shut the door on her. A local councillor, Khadim Hussain, then appeared and unfortunately appeared to suggest that the programme-makers were endangering the children. Since then, Ahmed explained, a man has been arrested and the police are investigating.

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From Bedfordshire on Sunday:

MP’s aide quits her role after internet intrusion

MP Nadine Dorries’ right hand woman has quit her job claiming to be a victim of ‘spiteful and fabricated tittle-tattle’ on the internet.

Lynn Elson, a long time friend of the Mid Bedfordshire MP, has worked as Mrs Dorries’ researcher and media inquiry representative for two years.

Ms Elson made her decision after claims about her appeared on a website blog.

She told Bedfordshire on Sunday that she had lodged complaints relating to a man to both Bedfordshire and Gloucestershire police forces…

“I have decided that spiteful and fabricated tittle-tattle published on the internet by a person who has never met me, spoken to me, had any contact with me and knows nothing about me, is something I don’t wish to tolerate or put my family through.”

It should be noted that the headline does not have any quotation marks, giving the impression that the “internet intrusion” is an established fact rather than simply Elson’s assertion; further, the author of the article appears to have absolutely no interest in what the “claims about her” might be. Elson deliberately implies that something of a private family nature is being banded around the internet, when what she is in fact objecting to is Tim Ireland’s discussion of publically-available data about her company – Marketing Management Midlands Ltd – and the payments made to it via Dorries’ expenses allowance.

The accusation of “intrusion” is also somewhat ironic, given that one of Elson’s recent tasks on behalf of Dorries was to brief the media on how Dorries’ new lover’s wife is an alcoholic who is estranged from her daughters; Dorries  spiteful blog entry on the subject ended with the following:

I wont be making any further comments. Any further press queries please contact lynn@elson.myzen.co.uk

Dorries’ payments to Elson have been under scrutiny for some time; in June 2010 John Swaine noted in the Telegraph that:

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Last month, the Guardian reported on exposed undercover police officer Mark Kennedy’s links to corporate spying:

The undercover police officer whose unmasking led to the collapse of a trial of six environmental protesters on Monday apparently also worked as a corporate spy, according to documents seen by the Guardian.

…In February 2010 – a month before resigning – he set up Tokra Limited, at an address in Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire…

…Calling himself a logistics officer, Kennedy registered himself as sole director of the company. Intriguingly, the address he used is the work address of Heather Millgate, a solicitor specialising in personal injury, and a former director of Global Open, a private security firm.

…It first came to public attention in 2007 when it was implicated in the case of Paul Mercer, a friend of the then Conservative shadow defence minister, Julian Lewis, who was exposed by the Campaign Against the Arms Trade of spying for the arms firm BAE.

Paul Mercer (no apparent relation to Patrick Mercer) is the author of several books, including Longman’s Directory of British Political Organisations (1994) and an anti-CND exposé called “Peace” of the Dead (1986), which involved infiltration of the organisation. In the 1980s he was associated with the radical libertarian strand of the Young Conservatives and became a local councillor; along with his friendship with Lewis, the late Mike Keith Smith of the Conservative Democratic Alliance (who has featured on this blog several times previously, for example here and here) described him on a forum in 2007 as a “personal friend for years”. According to legal documents relating to CAAT, Mercer’s organisation is called LigneDeux Associates.

The link to Kennedy through Global Open has provided the hook for an interesting and refreshingly unsensationalized article on Indymedia, which overviews Mercer’s career and includes some new material about activities in Nottingham:

Mercer has a long-standing interest in protest movements. In his sworn affidavit to the court during the CAAT case, Mercer insisted that “most of my research involves the automated searching of public websites and newsletters,” indeed he claims to have “a good reputation for my ability to rigorously search the Internet.” Nevertheless, he says he has “a wide range of contacts” and “does sometimes receive information from anonymous sources, as do many journalists.” At a meeting organised by think tank Policy Exchange in January he described himself as having spent 29 years trying to “combine an academic study of extra-parliamentary groups with actually going and seeing what happens on protests.” He claimed to have “covered and having been on pretty well every major public order disturbance in London over that period,” including the Poll Tax Riots and Mayday 2001.

The article notes that the Policy Exchange meeting can be seen on YouTube here; Mercer was introduced by Dean Godson (blogged here) as “one of the pre-eminent authorities on extremism of all kinds in the United Kingdom” and as giving “a rare public appearance”. The Indymedia article summarizes:

For all his supposed expertise, the analysis he presented at the meeting is unremarkable, mainly notable for the way in which he deliberately obscures the distinction between protest and riot so that he can talk about “all the major riots: NUM, Poll Tax, BNP, Reclaim The Streets, criminal justice, J18, Mayday… Tamils, Palestinians and now the students.” He went on to suggest, following the same analysis, that the Poll Tax Riots were organised by the Militant Tendency, latterly the Socialist Party. Despite the role of Trotskyist groups in “organising” riots, Mercer contended that violence at protests was typically instigated by “anarchist groups, squatters and what the Home Secretary rightly referred to as this ‘feral underclass.'” This “underclass” is apparently made up of Millwall football fans (who he seemed to suggest, kicked off the Poll Tax Riots) and hunt saboteurs. Having offered these insights into the causes of public disorder, Mercer then sought to justify the use of kettling and argue that prosecuting police officers for instance of brutality against demonstrators had cultivated “a reluctance of police officers on the frontline to actually hit people as hard as is necessary.”

It’s telling that Mercer’s roll-call of disruptive protests makes no mention of the rise of the English Defence League. However, Mercer’s approach appears to have earned him some grudging respect from those he investigates; a commentator adds:

I remember Mercer when he turned up at some Greenpeace meetings in Nottingham.

I have no doubt that he had an ulterior motive in doing so but at the same he was quite open about the fact that he had had books published and that, politically, I remember he always said that he was a libertarian. (In contrast most Greenpeace activists seemed to be the opposite). But unlike any other infiltrator or undercover police officer I have read about recently he was capable of maintaining a coherent political argument.

He may have just been very good at what he did but on some issues such as opposing McDonalds restaurants near schools, putting an incinerator in the middle of a city or opposing GM crops he not only had a grasp of the issues but was passionate at the same time.

Certainly, although Mercer’s analysis may be politicised and arguable, it’s clear that he has made some serious efforts with his researches and that his professional success can’t simply be dismissed as the result of self-promotion or bandwagon-jumping. Given the number of charlatans, fantasists, manipulators, and propagandists who pass themselves off as experts on extremism (some of whom have featured on this blog), it’s worth remembering that some more serious persons exist.

FOOTNOTE: Incidentally, the latest Private Eye (1281 p. 28) has a piece on private spies at protests, noting the case of C2i, which closed following “Austin Powers-style blunders” by one of its employees; typically for the Eye, the mocking jibe has been lifted uncredited from a website, in this case that of the protest group Plane Stupid. The Eye adds that C2i was run by an ex-army officer named Justin King, who now heads a similar outfit called Lynceus. Advisers include John Dearlove, brother of the former head of MI6 and (quoting the organisation) “a member of the Cabinet Office Security and Intelligence Secretariat during the premiership of Mr Blair”, and Sir Neil Thorne, who founded, according to the Eye, “the Armed Forces and Police Parliamentary Schemes, which allow MPs to play at being soldiers and policemen”.

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The above image comes from a pseudonymous attack blog which was used ahead of a 2007 council election* to smear a candidate as a paedophile. Tim Ireland determined it to be the work of two activists working for his local MP, Anne Milton, and he blogged about it at the time; as a result, he was himself smeared for his troubles. Tim contacted Jonathan Lord, MP for Woking and at that time Chairman of the Guildford Conservative Association. Lord’s duty was to investigate any activity that might bring the party into disrepute, but he declined to act on Tim’s evidence on the grounds that the target of the “paedophile” smear had not himself complained, that no criminal law had been broken, and because Tim had contacted him by email rather than on paper. As Tim writes:

because Jonathan Lord swept this under the carpet, those who were involved… were able to excuse/disguise their disgraceful behaviour with entirely false implications if not specific allegations that I imagined or invented the whole thing as part of what they contend to be a harassment campaign against Anne Milton.

Since then, bogus accusations of “harassment” have become a convenient strategy for various persons who don’t like Tim finding and highlighting information that might interfere with their attempts to manipulate public perceptions about themselves or particular subjects. The list of those who have jumped on the bandwagon ranges from a couple of MPs (here and here), through to certain on-line commentators, and on to some particularly vicious cyber-bullies. The full background (including why this subject is of interest to me) is provided here.

Tim recently encountered Lord at a public event, and asked him about his failure to act. He also covertly recorded Lord’s “off the record” response, in which he admits that the two activists were acting irresponsibly, but that because they had themselves been selected as candidates for the local council election he had decided not to do anything beyond some stern words in private:

You thought that [the two activists] Chambers and Paul were completely out of order and beyond control or whatever… By the time you raised it with me Mike Chambers was already a candidate, and if he hadn’t been a candidate then…

I told them, stop being childish. You know, if you want to do a blog about national politics, or even, you know, clean stuff about local policy, that’s fine, I said. But cut out any personal stuff, I don’t want to hear, I don’t want to know about it. I said, you know, basically, you know, it’s lucky you guys have already been selected, because otherwise, you know, and we’re in the middle of a campaign now…

So this is all off the record, OK? In the middle of an election, you know, you don’t obviously want to give succour to your opponent or, you know, someone who, you know, who might twist your words in ways that you have on other little things, you know. And, do you know what I mean? And so I was very straight with those guys in telling them to cut it out, and, you know, if we hadn’t already been in the middle of an election campaign, and I think they were already both nominated and so on, you know, then it might have been a slightly different story.

You would think that the activists had been guilty of some unfortunate private indiscretion, rather than of orchestrating a thoroughly malicious campaign to use inflammatory lies to discredit – and perhaps physically endanger – a political opponent. If Lord had cared a jot for standards in public life, he would have done his duty to ensure that two such disgraceful individuals should never have had any chance to stand for public office – and he would stepped up to his responsibility  to put right the wrong done to those who had been smeared by activists within his political party.

*Amended: I had originally written “the 2005 UK election campaign”

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2005:

THE wife of Archbishop Gilbert Deya, the controversial British-based evangelist who claims he can make women pregnant through the power of prayer, has been arrested hours after claiming to have given birth to a boy in the latest twist in Kenya’s “miracle babies” investigation.

…Yesterday, Archbishop Deya said the baby was proof he was able to help infertile women conceive. His wife arrived at a hospital in Nairobi on Saturday, carrying a new-born baby, a handful of blood-stained clothes and a placenta.

2011:

The wife of self-proclaimed miracle worker Gilbert Deya on Friday pleaded for forgiveness as she started a three-year jail term for stealing a baby boy.

…The court heard that Mrs Deya stole the baby from Kenyatta National Hospital on September 10, 2005. She alleged she gave birth to the baby miraculously.

…The magistrate did not agree with defence lawyer Mr Elisha Ongoya that a child, which the wife of UK-based evangelist is said to have given birth to, was exchanged between Nairobi and Kenyatta National hospitals.

Mary Deya was previously jailed for a related offence in 2007; I first blogged on media reports about the “miracle babies” way back in 2004, and in April 2010 I was depressed to note that Gilbert Deya was still in the UK, despite an extradition request from Kenya. He remains in the UK even now – and his nephew Paul Deya was recently jailed for life for murdering his own son in 2009:

A south London church worker has been found guilty of the murder of his three-year-old son after a trial at the Old Bailey.

Paul Deya, 32, of Bermondsey, slit his son Wilson’s throat in November 2009, six months after having a dream about killing children, the jury heard.

…Mrs [Jackline] Deya told the court: … “We didn’t seek advice, we just prayed over it.”

Mrs Deya said her husband became calm after these prayers, but she believed it was at this point that he formed a plan to kill Wilson.

“Paul was angry and that is why he killed my Wilson,” she said.

“He was not mentally ill.”

Gilbert Deya’s influence was cited by Paul Deya’s defence lawyer:

Baroness Kennedy QC, defending, said the church to which the couple belonged was “strange” and “cult-like”.

“This was a tight-knit religious community run by a charlatan,” she said.

There are several other pastors associated with Gilbert Deya Ministries, although the organisation as a whole does not appear to maintain links with the wider neo-Pentecostal “scene”. (1)

(1) Alongside his son Pastor Amos Deya, pastors associated with his ministry include Pastor Brazz Bakka, Pastor Souzie Balosa, Pastor John Ezedom, Pastor Giovanni Ghidotti, Pastor Femi Emmanuel Hezekiah, Pastor Gabriel Idowu, Pastor Godwin YB Kwawu,  Pastor James Munga, Pastor Jerry Mukobo, “Pastor Shelly”, and Sister Mucha Zungunde. There are English-language and French-language services, and churches in Birmingham, Feltham, Leicester, London (Hackney and Walthamstow), Liverpool, Luton, and Manchester. Ghidotti runs a congregation for “people born in Europe, with a European upbringing and mentality, irrespective of race or colour”; his website does not mention Deya by name anywhere, although his congregation meets at a a GDM church in London.

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A few days ago, the media treated us to a flurry of headlines about a supposed UFO in Jerusalem, the most dramatic being the Daily Mail‘s “Are aliens here? Shining white ‘UFO’ spotted over Jerusalem shrine?”, the Daily Telegraph‘s “UFO hovers over Jerusalem shrine“; and Fox News’ “UFO Hovers Over Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock Shrine“. CBS at least added a question mark: “UFO over Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock?“. My personal favourite, though, is a cheeky one from Aquapour: “Jerusalem Dome Of The Rock UFO Videos Impress Pope“; only half-way through the story is it made clear that this is a reference to UFO investigator Nick Pope rather than to Benedict XVI.

The headlines failed to make clear that the only evidence for these claims were some videos on YouTube, and that the only named person who has come forward claiming to have seen the unearthly entity is the man who posted the original video: this was a certain “Mr Eligael Gidlovitch of Tel Aviv” (some reports name him as “Aligal Gidliovic”, “Eligael Gedalyovich”, or as “Eli Gael”); he has a YouTube channel here, and he was lucky enough to capture a second UFO a couple of days later (“This ufo was higher in the sky and moved above the old city for long time”, the blurb tells us).

The Jerusalem Post has poured cold water over the story:

…HOAXkiller1 is leading the pack of debunking videos, with some 350,000 views on Sunday evening for six separate pieces, showing the original photo available on Wikipedia Commons that was the backdrop for the rather primitive work done in an attempt to make it look like part of a video shoot.

Besides close-ups that showed the background image was actually a static image on a screen and pointing out the faults in the attempt to show flashes of light, an effect called “motion tile” was also used in eligael’s video to enable the deception of an authentic video camera shot.

Motion tile mirrors a bit of the edges of a static image “to hide the black edges created when they added fake camera shake to the video,” HOAXkiller 1 explains. “The camera movements are fake. That is why the mirror lines follow the movement of the camera.”

HOAXkiller1’s YouTube channel is here. Fox News is also having second thoughts, suggesting the videos may be a viral marketing ploy to tie-in with the film Battle: Los Angeles.

A site called All News Web (“The World’s Only Inter-Galactic Daily News Service”) claims to have broken the original story with this article, and the piece’s author, Michael Cohen, warns that there is a conspiracy afoot:

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Hmm, let me think now….

WorldNetDaily reports:

A mysterious, pale green figure seen in televised news coverage of the Egyptian riots has prompted some viewers to ask, “Could this be the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse?”

…Between the crowds of protesters and barricades, the video shows a flowing, pale green image that resembles an erect rider atop a horse in Medieval-like barding. The ethereal figure remains for a few moments before floating over protesters’ heads and off the screen.

Yes, the Book of Revelation should be taken literally, although by “pale” we should understand “transparent and green”. However:

…Some claim the video’s “pale rider” is a sign and the greenish tint is somehow symbolic of Islam, while others insist the image has been added to the footage by editing technolgy. Still others point to three, trailing points of light in the footage that move away from the crowds at the same time and speed as the “horseman,” indicating that both the “rider” and the lights are merely smudges or reflections cast on the lens of a moving camera.

Which of those might turn out to be the truth, I wonder? Perhaps it’s worth pointing out (probably not) that the “pale rider” in Revelation is a symbol of plague; there’s no actual rider, no actual horse, and certainly no application to anti-Mubarak protests in Egypt in 2011. However, the above is just a symptom of the religious hysteria which regularly feeds off uncertainty in the Middle East; back in 2006 I noted similar millennial enthusiasm over Israeli action in Lebanon, which included excitement over a medieval psalter found in an Irish bog.

Apparently it seems obvious to some that the fall of a pro-US hardman could not occur without God giving it special mention, and so Biblical texts that reference Egypt are being pressed into service. As I noted a few days ago, Joel Richardson has attempted to relate current events to the rise of a Muslim anti-Christ;  Shaddy Soliman, pastor of Every Nation Church in Lake Mary, Florida (I’ve blogged on the Every Nation grouping previously) is also on the bandwagaon:

This is not the time for our world leader to be blinded by the ideology of democracy and not see the bigger picture.

…If you read Isaiah 19, it will explain a lot of what is taking place right now. You see the process looks very ugly in Isaiah 19 but the end result is amazing.

Isaiah 19 warns the Kingdom of Judah against entering into an alliance with Egypt against the domination of Assyria in the eighth century BCE, and it contains a  prediction that Egypt will suffer disaster. This was astute advice, since Assyria went on to conquer Egypt, although the chapter ends with with a late interpolation (in a different style) in which Egypt and Assyria convert to the Yahweh religion, offer “sacrifices” and “cereal offerings”, and Israel is recognised as “the centre of the world”. That proved rather too optimistic, although it doubtless did wonders for the self-image of a small country squeezed between two regional superpowers.

Isaiah 19 was written for people living at the time; it does not explain  anything about “what is taking place” nearly three thousand years later. Of course, one may choose to discern a “timeless” spiritual message, too, but that would be that God’s people should trust in God and not compromise their values through dubious political alliances. It is difficult to see how that could be used to justify backing Mubarak.

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Back in July, Patrick Mercer MP joked with Mail diarist Richard Kay about his ex-mistress:

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

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

This jocular tone struck me as coarsely inappropriate: if Mercer’s claim was true, he surely has to take some responsibility for triggering a mental health problem in Coyle (he had made promises to her which he then reneged on), and he ought rather to be discrete and contrite on the subject. I also noted that he previously used the label of “stalker” to smear Tim Ireland; Tim’s blogposts on Mercer’s association with self-styled “terror-trackers” were doubtless inconvenient and tiresome to the MP.

The Mail now has a follow-up piece about Coyle, with new allegations about a supposed incident in November

…Mr Mercer is considering applying for a restraining order to protect himself.

…one well-placed insider said: ‘Mrs Coyle kicked Mr Mercer in the groin and then kicked and punched him as he lay on the floor. Mr Mercer didn’t raise a hand but he was terrified.

‘The Newark MP reported the incident to Jill Pay, the Commons Serjeant-at-Arms, and called in the police on her advice.

… This newspaper has also been told that Mrs Coyle was asked by police to have no further contact with Mr Mercer, the Tory Homeland Security spokesman.

Following the incident, Mr Mercer has had CCTV fitted in his office… In addition, he carries a panic alarm linked to the nearest police station and fitted with a high-quality tape-recorder that is activated when the alarm goes off.

‘Patrick is frightened at what might happen,’ said a source. ‘He believes he is in danger and has had to protect himself. He is terrified about what Mrs Coyle maydo next.’

…Mr Mercer, the son of a former Bishop of Exeter, refused to comment. Mrs Coyle said: ‘I have nothing to say.’

This raises a number of questions. Why has Mercer had CCTV fitted already, but is still only “considering” applying for a restraining order? Why didn’t he get the restraining order back in July, when he received the alarm? Who pays for the CCTV?

And who are the “well-placed insider” and the “source”? They claim to know Mercer’s mind and give the impression of being sympathetic to him – it’s doubtful that such people would have spoken to the press without checking with Mercer first. And why was Mercer happy to joke about the situation back in July, but now has “refused to comment”? It looks very much like he’s briefing against Coyle while keeping a bit of distance. The article leaves the distasteful impression that Mercer is playing the media – and it should be recalled that other stories that Mercer has put into the media have turned out to be questionable.

Incidentally, Mercer has also been known to opine about our “our overstretched police and security services”.

FOOTNOTE: One further question I have concerns what other channels of complaint Mercer could have followed besides the Serjeant-at-Arms. Coyle works for another MP; in 2009 a Commission looked into the subject of “the Employment of Members’ Staff by the House”, including responsibility for “discipline and dismissal”. The Commission observed that:

Given the close relationship between a Member and his or her staff, it would be a difficult situation if a Member wished to dismiss but the House was not willing to endorse the dismissal. It is harder to envisage a situation in which the House wanted to dismiss a member of staff against the wishes of a Member, but it could in principle happen if a member of staff committed a serious offence such as harassment of other staff or was found not to be doing the work.

The Commission concluded that “Our preference would be for the House (or if appropriate the IPSA) instead to give greater support to Members as employers,” but that if the House wanted to go ahead, “it should not be implemented until the next general election at the earliest”.

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