Bartholomew's Notes

A bit more on Jason “Molotov” Mitchell, whom I blogged on a couple of days ago: it turns out that when he’s not eating Muhammad cookies on TV or promoting crank conspiracies about Barack Obama, his “Illuminati Films” knocks out promotional videos for Campus Harvest. This evangelical organisation was founded by Pastor Ron Lewis, who is based at King’s Park International Church in Durham, NC. I blogged on this particular church in 2005; it is part of the controverisal “Every Nation” grouping of neo-Pentecostal churches. Molotov’s father Wayne Mitchell was the previous pastor; further details have been added to my previous blog entry on the subject.

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Seismic Shock carries a guest article about the BNP’s Rev Robert West, highlighting my blog entries about his recent appearance in the pulpit at a village Baptist chapel. The chapel is part of the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches (FIEC), which in turn is part of a grouping called Affinity. I tried to get the FIEC (which has website banner suggesting support for a multi-racial society) to make a public statement about the incident, without success. Others, however, have apparently had more luck:

British Messianic Jews had expressed grave anxiety over the FIEC’s slow response, first blogged by Bartholomew, to the BNP priest’s meeting at an FIEC church. However one concerned Messianic Jew was told that the “FIEC is entirely opposed to any BNP spokesman or representative being used to forward their cause in our churches.” Messianic Jews would say of BNP support of Israel, with friends like these who needs enemies!

Well, that’s a nice start, although it is still nothing more than a private statement made to a particular individual; there is nothing on the FIEC website.

The BNP decided to downplay anti-Semitism for strategic reasons several years ago; Nick Griffin (author of an anti-Jewish pamphlet called Who Are the Mind-Benders?) realised that attacking Muslims was more likely to yield results, and he is quoted as having said that “The proper enemy to any political movement isn’t necessarily the most evil and the worst. The proper enemy is the one we can most easily defeat.” Jewish groups, however, remain unimpressed.

Rev West was interviewed at home on the East Midlands local edition of the BBC Politics Show a few weeks ago (I also made a brief contribution); behind his chair he had been careful to place both an Israeli flag and a British flag. West showed the camera a certificate dating from the 1970s which confirmed his association with a Welsh Pentecostal denomination called the Apostolic Church; the certificate had been signed by Omri Bowen, who was a theologian within the group. The Apostolic Church made a private statement to a blogger repudiating West’s views a while ago; however, as with the FIEC, there has been no formal or public statement on the subject.

(Name vars.: Omri C. Bowen; O. C. Bowen)

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The Nigeria This Day has the latest from evangelist Helen Ukpabio, who has endured global opprobrium since a British television documentary suggested in November that her campaign against child witches had led to children being abused in the Nigerian state of Akwa Ibom. Her film End of the Wicked was named as having contributed to the hysteria. However:

“There was no place in the film where children were branded witches rather, we saw greedy children initiated into witchcraft by other children who were witches in the school,” Ukpabio explained.

She’s taken this line before, as I blogged here, but it remains an incoherent objection. We’re also told that Ukpabio:

• is suing Channel 4 and the documentary’s narrator, the actress Sophie Okonedo (mis-spelt as “Sophie Okowedo”).
• has complained to OFCOM, the British television regulator, about the programme.
• has demanded that a home for children stigmatized as witches be shut down as a “419” and its operators – Gary Foxcroft (mis-spelt as “Gary Fox Croft”) and Sam Ikpe-Itauma (mis-spelt as “Sam Ikpe-Itauman”) be arrested. She has previously suggested that Ikpe-Itauma is a “wizard”.

She also makes the claim that End of the Wicked is actually “radically different from the pirated film wherein our ministries was wickedly libeled  thereof”.

I’ve blogged on Ukpabio a few times in the past; feedback from her supporters and family includes the suggestions that I am a “cyber murderer”, as well as being “wicked, crooked, crafty, poisonous, and dangerous to women in general”.

(Hat tip: Bulldada Newsblog)

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Terry Krepel draws attention to the antics of WorldNetDaily video columnist Jason “Molotov” Mitchell, whose latest diatribe takes the usual groan-inducing line that Obama is actually…a Nazi.

Krepel notes:

More about Molotov Mitchell: His real name is Jason, he has produced a number of inaccurate, smear-laden anti-Obama videos (including an embrace of the Obama birth certificate conspiracy), and  he’s a part of something called the Zealot Movement, an extremist Christian movement built on the straight-edge punk lifestyle that, according to Mitchell, “avoid[s] the putfalls of American, effeminised Christianity” and embraces “sexual purity through the practice of abstinence until marriage and the abolition of homosexuality.”

Mitchell was also behind “Flamethrower TV”, a show which received some attention last year when he made and ate a cookie bearing a cartoon face of Muhammad, to the delight of WND‘s Joe Kovaks.

The “straight-edge punk lifestyle” has been around for a long time, and it combines punk music with a puritanical rejection of alcohol and drugs. Mitchell’s “Zealot Movement” adds a layer of Christian dominionism:

A limited world view combined with a misplaced desire for tradition has caused the Church to be splintered into a thousand factions, all claiming to be keepers of the “true Faith.” Now we stand in the wake of schoolyard massacres, no-fault divorces and infant genocide with nothing to offer but dead tradition and books about the rapture.

In other words, rather than wait for the “rapture” to take Christians into heaven, Christians need to take charge here and now:

…We are children of the Sword, the face of Truth on a dying planet.  We are the worldwide tribe and at the feet of our King the nations will bow.  We are the pure and royal priesthood.  All that we put our hands to must prosper.  We are servants to man, relentless in our toil, driven by love of the Greatest Servant.  We are the Brotherhood of Christ.  Our family does not break like those of the fallen world.  We are the enemies of injustice and defenders of those without defense.  Our eyes are the coals of righteousness and our hearts burn with hatred for all that is evil.  We are the warriors.  We are the fearless.  We are the Zealots.

That’s from a Xanga website belonging the “Zealot Leader“; no name is given, but there is a photo of a bared tattooed torso which appears to belong to Mitchell. The same material appeared on a “Zealot Movement” website in 2001 that is no longer active. This Zealot Movement website also carried a quote attributed in the Bible to King Jehu, “Come with me and see my zeal for the LORD”; that’s in 2 Kings 10:16, and the way that Jehu demonstrates his “zeal” in the following verses is by killing the family of Ahab and then massacring the followers of Baal.

Mitchell gives some background to his philsophy in an interview here:

Straight Edge made me feel great physically, and cleared my mind of the drug-induced haze of my teen years, but when that happened, I realised that that was the end of the ride. My body was whole, but my spirit was sick. Straight Edge couldn’t help me when I wondered why I was here; straight edge was great for my body, but useless for my soul. I faced that, deep down, and began to study religions with the new clarity straight edge had given my mind. I studied Buddhism, Islam, and Mormonism. I came very close to becoming a Hare Krishna follower, before finding many glaring inconsistencies in the Vedic texts and their hierarchy of gods and demigods. Ultimately, I began to read the Bible as much as I hated the idea of reading the Western world’s propaganda, when I stumbled upon a Scripture that intrigued me. “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” (John 14:6) Now, most world religions can all hold hands and say, “we all serve the same God; we just do it in different ways,” but this quote from the Man all religions credit as divine and the greatest of teachers was a shockwave for me to read. I thought it was profoundly arrogant, at first, but then I considered the possibility that he could be right. If that was so, then I was in trouble, and so was just about everyone else. C.S. Lewis made a powerful suggestion that Jesus could only be a Liar, Lunatic or Lord. So I began to study the life of Jesus against the lives of the other prophets, the accounts of Josephus, the archaeological evidence behind Scripture, etc. and ultimately saw that there was no other option-Jesus was indeed, Lord.

The Zealot Movement was a natural progression from there on out. Anyone serious about the Christian religion will avoid the pitfalls of American, effeminised Christianity, and join a serious movement. The Zealots are one of the best, compromising nothing and obeying Scripture as Law, the same as the Early Church Fathers did.

…Go to Barnes and Noble, buy a cheap Bible and read it. Even if you hate the idea of Christianity, like I did, you’ll never change America until you’ve studied the Judeo-Christian foundations of the “last world power.” If you want to make more money, find out why the money has “In God We Trust” on it. Turn off the TV and read that Bible with an open mind. Pretty soon, you’ll see things you’ve never seen before.

Mitchell also dislikes Wiccans and pagans, whom he also accuses – with thudding inevitability – of being Nazis; as he explains back on the Xanga site:

The occult and paganism are indeed separate entities with different theologies, practices, etc.  but only as much as Hitler’s S.S. and the German regulars were separate.  Semantics.  They’re both antichristian in their belief system, which is to say that they both oppose the very foundation of Western civilization and submission to spiritual authority.  Goddesses and earthen worship, Lucifer and hedonism, it’s all in the same category- “do as thou wilt.”  And the deeper you dig, the more ugly connections you will find, between Norse mythology and wicka, earth worship and survival of the fittest, ultimately culminating in what Hitler called “a brave religion founded in the worship of Nature and not the effeminate pity ethic of the Jew Christ.”  Call it what you will, humanism, hedonism, wicka, Odinism, race supremacy, the Occult- only one base principle dictates their doctrines- “Do as thou wilt.”

Christian Zealotry stands apart with its theology being based in “Not my will, but Thine be done.”  Sacrifice and giving vs. survival and self-gratification.  If you want to plod along like sheep, following nothing but your lust, then join the Occult, the wickens, the Nazi Party, or just don’t even think about spiritual life and responsibility at all.  But if you want to follow the higher path that most will never dare to tread, the Way of Love, the Royal Priesthood, the Eternal Brotherhood, then submission to Christ is your Destiny.

“Black Metal” also gets the thumbs-down; returning to the interview:

Black metal represents liberalism’s logical destiny. The black metal practitioner and the ACLU both hate the concepts of the moral majority, the Ten Commandments on a court house, prayer in school, and anything else that would dare suggest absolute Truth, but the black metal-head has the spine to carry his beliefs out to their logical end, and openly attack. They all subscribe to Nietchzeian philosophy, the ACLU, NOW, the homosexual community, the black metal scene, and they are all out for the same thing: the total annihilation of Christian law, as it is the only obstacle they can not seem to surmount.

In 2005 Mitchell’s “Illuminati Films” made a documentary on musical subcultures, entitled Dark Planet: Visions of America. A 2007 review in Black Oak Presents by Robert Benson (p.11 of this pdf) calls the film “imformative and imaginatively compiled”, but he complains that it “grossly exaggerated” the cultural significance of these groups and has “many fatal flaws”. In particular, he complains that the “zealot” segment, in which Mitchell’s wife “DJ Dolce” is interviewed, is biased to show members as “happy and charitable”, and that the skinhead segment dismisses the reality of  a “white power” grouping. The black metal segment, meanwhile, “spouted the usual rhetoric about Satanism in American society”.

In February, Mitchell treated WND readers to a particuarly bizarre piece in which he mocks liberals for believing in evolution so that they can avoid moral responsibility, but being inconsistent because they don’t follow the logic of “survival of the fittest”, which should mean support for capitalism, militant Islam, and discouraging homosexuality; the larger point he is attempting to make, if there is one, remains obscure to me.

UPDATE: A reader draws my attention to another interesting connection. According to this profile:

Mitchell’s parents divorced when he was five, and his father, an evangelical pastor who now heads the Beacon City Church in Boston, raised him. “I was a troubled adolescent, an angry young man who was always fighting and drinking,” he told me. “Dad kicked me out when I was seventeen, which was one of the best things that ever happened to me.” He became interested in the punk scene and spent a year, by choice, living on the street, which is where he discovered God. After reading the Book of Mormon and the Koran, and nearly becoming a Hare Krishna, Mitchell turned to Christianity. “No light came down, but it was the beginning of a transformation,” he said.

The pastor father is Wayne Mitchell, and Beacon City Church is part of the Every Nation grouping of churches; I have blogged on this controversial neo-Pentecostal group  – which has its origins in the 1980s “Maranatha” movement – a number of times in the past. Wayne Mitchell formerly pastored King’s Park International Church, which I wrote about in 2005, and which is currently pastored by Ron Lewis. A poster to a critical web forum concerning Every Nation noted in 2007 that

Ron Lewis has a new website: www.ronlewisministries.com

I noticed on the media page that there are several videos produced by Illuminati Pictures, an independent film company based in Durham that appears to have ties to KPIC. They also produced Campus Harvest’s new promo video that’s just been posted to You Tube.

Campus Harvest  was founded by Lewis, and one Campus Harvest video featuring Jason Mitchell can be seen here. One wonders whether Ron Lewis or Wayne Mitchell have any views about “Molotov”‘s methods of telling the world the message of Christ.

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News of last month’s articles by AN Wilson (in the Daily Mail and in the New Statesman here and here), in which he explains his gradual re-conversion to Christianity from atheism, have crossed the Atlantic; Charles Colson in particular exults:

Again, the question is “why?” Part of the reason was that atheism and atheists in his words, ” [miss] out on some very basic experiences of life.” He described listening to Bach or reading the works of Christian authors and realizing that their “perception of life was deeper, wiser, more rounded than [his] own.” seeing the world through the eyes of faith is “much more interesting” he said, than the alternatives.

Then there was the low esteem in which Darwinism holds man. The people who insist that we are “simply anthropoid apes” can’t account for something as basic as language. The “existence of language,” love and music, to name but a few, convinced Wilson that we are “spiritual beings.” For Wilson, they prove that “the religion of the incarnation, asserting that God made humanity in His image, and continually restores humanity in His image, is simply true.”

Then there’s what he regards the “an even stronger argument”: “the way that Christian faith transforms individual lives.” From “Bonhoeffer’s serenity before he was hanged” to the person next to you at church, Christians bear witness to the truth of Christianity and that as a “working blueprint for life” and “template against which to measure experience, it fits.”

I couldn’t put it any better. Welcome home, Mr. Wilson. It’s great to have you back.

Of course, as with Antony Flew’s (temporary) turn to deism, the story of an intellectual atheist who rejects disbelief is invariably trumpeted; but I can’t imagine the fundamentalist Colson and the mainline Wilson having much to say to each other.

I wrote about Wilson for a student newspaper some years ago, when I was an undergraduate (see below) – it was a report on a talk he had given about why we are better off not believing in an afterlife. Certainly, he critiqued Christianity, but his discourse fell very short of Dawkinesque “railing”; then as now, his views seem to have been largely grounded in personal introspection rather than rationalistic deconstruction. I saw him again a few years later discussing his Jesus book, and he was quite irritated by a questioner who conflated critical historical Jesus research with atheism.

In his New Statesman essay Wilson writes that

My doubting temperament, however, made me a very unconvincing atheist. And unconvinced. My hilarious Camden Town neighbour Colin Haycraft, the boss of Duckworth and husband of Alice Thomas Ellis, used to say, “I do wish Freddie [Ayer] wouldn’t go round calling himself an atheist. It implies he takes religion seriously.”

It seems to me that would also apply to someone who went round calling then-Archbishop George Carey “Mr Blobby“. In contrast to his tirades against Carey, Wilson praised Rowan Williams’ qualities on his election to Archbishop, noting his “cleverness and originality and subtlety” in matters of public debate; but those are the very things which have made Williams a hate-figure for many conservatives of the Colson variety, who want black-and-white attacks on Islam and a re-affirmation of Biblical fundamentalism.

Wilson also wrote positively about Christianity a few years ago in a (must-read) piece about the gay men he knew at theological college. After meeting one former fellow-student in a bookshop,

I went out, and like Peter in the Gospels, I wept bitterly…I have lost my religion – their religion – but I do not feel that this is a good thing. I am aware that the spiritual life of England is most alive in its national church…These are men who have been prepared to devote their whole lives to working in poor parishes, visiting the sick, the housebound, the lonely, the prisoners and the captives. They believe in, and live, the Gospel of Christ.

Wilson’s latest New Statesman piece includes the reminiscence that he once denounced

[C.S.] Lewis’s muscular defence of religious belief. Much more to my taste, I said, had been the approach of the late Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey, whose biography I had just read.

A young priest had been to see him in great distress, saying that he had lost his faith in God. Ramsey’s reply was a long silence followed by a repetition of the mantra “It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter”. He told the priest to continue to worship Jesus in the Sacraments and that faith would return…I can remember almost yelling that reading C S Lewis’s Mere Christianity made me a non-believer…

There’s no indication that he has revised his view of Lewis (I must say I found Mere Christianity insufferably smug), although it’s strange he is now affirming a duff argument from personal incredulity about the origins of language. Wilson also tentatively commends James LeFanu’s book Why Us?, which has drawn fire for its anti-Darwinist views.

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…but it’s probably just an oversight

WorldNetDaily reports on today’s announcement that Michael Savage is now banned from the UK:

Talk radio host Michael Savage is considering legal action against Britain’s top homeland security official after she released today a list grouping him with terrorists and neo-Nazi murderers banned from entry because the government believes their views might provoke violence.

…The others on the list are Jewish extremist Mike Guzovsky…

Guzovsky’s name has appeared on WorldNetDaily previously, in a 2004 article by Aaron Klein which suggested the extremist label was unfair; subsequent puff-pieces by Klein have preferred to use his Israeli name, Yekutel Ben Yaacov. Today’s article (not by Klein) is the first WND piece to describe Guzovsky as an “extremist”. Doubtless Klein – recent author of The Late Great State of Israel: How Enemies Within and Without Threaten the Jewish Nation’s Survival – will explain it all to us in due course.

As a result of today’s announcement, I’ve received a bump in hits to my 2006 piece on Klein and Guzovsky; this can be seen here, and a more developed piece by Terry Krepel here.

Variants of Guzovsky’s names in English include: Yekutel Ben Yaacov; Yekutiel Ben Yacov; Yekutiel Ben Yaacov; Mike Guzofsky; Yekutiel Ben Yaacov; Yekutiel Ben Yaakov; Yekutiel Ben Ya’acov; Yekutiel Ben Ya’akov; Yekutiel Ben Yakov; Yekutiel Ben Yacov; Yekutiel Guzofsky; Yekutiel Guzovsky; Mike Guzofsky; Mike Guzovsky; Michael Guzofsky. One website calls him “Mike Rosowski”; this is an error. A New Yorker article also clarifies that Ya’akov is Guzofsky.

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Oh dear – a British “psychedelic rock” musician named Joe Chapman (of “Spiral 25”, apparently) had better watch out:

mississippimud2007 said…Tell that bum joe chapman i’m after him and will destroy him. He’s pissed off the wrong American. I want the bastard on video if he has the testicles to do so. If the bastard wants war with me, he gets it. I don’t back down.

“Mississippimud2007” has featured on this blog previously; he is Jeff Davis, an American accountant who considers himself to be some kind of “counter-jihad” warrior. A few months ago he took aim at me for dissing Walid Shoebat and Pastor J. Grant Swank; the Swanksta’s sermons are reposted on Davis’s Mosquewatch website along with contributions from Shoebat’s son and others. He also uses the pseudonym “AmericanBNP”, expressing his support for the anti-Muslim views of the British far-right.

Davis’s wrath has been provoked by Mosquewatch‘s inclusion on a list of far-right websites on Chapman’s own site which have been labelled thus:

Fascist/Nazi/White Nationalist/”Patriot” web sites:
WARNING! – Most of these web sites contain some extremely offensive, racist or just plain nasty language and views. I recommend taking a long bath after visiting them because they tend to leave anyone who has the most basic of human qualities feeling dirty and not in a good way!

Davis complains:

British psychedelic rock musician, Joe Chapman on his site puts my site in with storm front ( A white racist group ) I’m not pleased. Joe Chapman, stand up and show me your face.

A short video follows, in which he denies having any racial prejudice (he “hates” Stormfront) and – as ever – he challenges his opponent to continue the argument by making a video himself; failure to do so will of course be an admission that Davis has won!

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More dimness from apocalyptic anti-Muslim Christian Joel Richardson:

Islamic Scholars Wrestle With Death-For-Apostasy Issue

If they decide in Death for Apostasy, there will no longer be a debate among liberals as to whether or not Islam conflicts with basic human rights. However, if they go the other way, it will open the door for further whitewashing of the reality on the ground in much of the Muslim world.

In other words, Muslim scholars can be divided into those who admit they want the infidels to be killed, and those who pretend they don’t. Presumably there can’t be a strand of serious Muslim discussion which is truly moderate and seeks an accommodation with civil society, because that would upset the “Muslim anti-Christ” fantasy which Richardson reads into the Bible and which is a central tenet of his militarised Christian fundamentalism.

Amusingly, this comes just days after WorldNetDaily, which has published and heavily promoted Richardson’s book on ex-Muslims, ran a column which argues that the biblical Book of Deuteronomy is “the key to saving of America”; Deuteronomy, of course, has no concept of religious freedom and it demands sanguinary penalties for those whose conduct (particularly in sexual matters) is deemed unacceptable.

This enthusiasm for the laws and penalties of Deuteronomy is shared by Christian Reconstructionists and by the Jewish far-right in Israel, but most believers would reject such extremism; mainstream Judaism and Christianity derive ethical guidance from other parts of the Bible using a great variety of interpretative methods, and the religions can adapt to – and help to develop – more humane perspectives on personal freedom and human rights. There is no reason to suppose that a religion as complex and diverse as Islam does not contain similar potential, or that Muslims are of necessity insensible to the advantages offered by a free society. Certain trends in Islamic thought have rejected “death for apostasy” for a long time; the scholars now discussing the issue will hopefully lend support for this view and so improve “the reality on the ground”. On the other hand, they may not, which will indeed be a blow for freedom and civil society in the Muslim world – but it would hardly prove that tolerant Islam does not exist.

Once again, Richardson offers up a conspiracy theory rather than a considered evaluation, calculated to whip up fear and apocalyptic fatalism. But I suppose that’s what the churches which invite him to speak want to hear.

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Another email arrives from the Jerusalem Connection, this time promoting a video laying out the familar story of how Muslim immigrants are going to take over the world by outbreeding everyone else:

A sobering video about Islam and how it may overwhelm Christendom unless Christians recognize the demographic realities, begin reproducing again, and share the gospel with Muslims.

The video  – entitled “Muslim Demographics” and posted by an anonymous evangelist called “FriendofMuslim” – has been circulating on the usual websites.

As expected, it’s is a farrago of piffle – we’re treated a list of dubiously sourced statistics and statements which are wielded clusmily and with no attempt at serious qualitative interpretation. For example, we’re told grimly that “a culture will decline” with a birth-rate of less than 2.1, as if “culture” can be quantified purely by counting indigenous heads in a particular country, and as if cultural ideas cannot spread by means other than from parent to child – it seems immigrants remain immune from any outside influence, although we’re also told that the situation can be saved if we “spread the Gospel” to them. There’s also of course no factoring-in of religious nominalism among immigrants.

The blog Islam in Europe debunks most of the actual figures in the video here. The blog also notes that:

[One source the video probably used] quotes Walter Rademacher of the German Federal Statistics Office who says quite clearly: “Even those people who are immigrants adopt after a couple years the lifestyle and the number of children per family. So the assumption that immigrants will stick to their habits is simply not true.” This is a point that most demographic doomsayers prefer to ignore. Second generation immigrants have fewer babies and marry at an older age, acting more and more like the native ethnic population. It is true that this is offset by the incoming immigration, but then it becomes a problem of immigration, not a ticking timebomb of the local population.

That’s a key point – the only exception to this process, it seems to me, is when an organised religious community with a strong separatist identity moves into an area wholesale, as with with the Amish or Haredi Jews, but such groups’  impact on the wider society is limited and even they have adapted and accommodated to the wider world to some extent. And despite Patrick Sookhdeo’s conspiracy theory on the subject (promoted by Charles Colson), this is not the pattern of Muslim immigration.

Of course, the above is simply an observation of what has happened – it’s not a law about must happen, and we know that extremist ideas, poor government social policies, or other factors can impede or even reverse integration. But the point is that such outcomes are far from inevitable.

We also know that some religious groups promote large families as a strategy to spread their ideology (I’m currently reading Kathryn Joyce’s Quiverfull, and there are doubtless Islamist equivalents of the likes of Doug Phillips), but this smacks of desperation: the same outside secularizing trends which have corroded religious commitment up until now are also going affect the next generation. Simply producing lots of children who will choose your way because they know no other is unlikely to be sustainable  in the face of the realities (both attractions and pressures) of modern society, and it offers no new intellectual content in a “war of ideas”.

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From WorldNetDaily:

Dinosaur blood extracted from bone

Collagen, hemoglobin, elastin, laminin and cell-like structures resembling blood and bone cells have been found in a dinosaur bone scientists still claim is 80 million years old, according to a report in Science magazine today.

Paleontologist Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University first claimed to have isolated soft tissues and collagen from a Tyrannosaurus rex leg bone several years ago.

…Young earth proponents see something entirely different in the findings. As one creationist noted: “There’s no way this blood could be 80 million years old. The evolutionists are just saying so because they cannot bear the thought of recent dinosaurs causing their millions of years scenario to come crashing down. Without the millions of years, Darwinism is dead, dead, dead.”

This, of course, is also WND editor Joseph Farah’s perspective: Farah rejects evolutionary biology, and he has in the past promoted a scurrilous anti-science film suggesting that evolutionary biology caused the Holocaust.

It must be annoying for scientists that whenever an advance or interesting discovery is made, opportunists who played part in the enterprise seek hijack journalistic interest with a crackpot interpretation which they then smugly suggest the scientists won’t admit simply because of ideological bias.

The paper itself – “Biomolecular Characterization and Protein Sequences of the Campanian Hadrosaur B. canadensis“, of which Schweitzer is lead author with a number of collaborators – was published in Science; the abstract and other resources can be seen on open access here. There is no evidence that Farah or his unnamed creationist have read the piece, or would even be able to comprehend it.

A serious article on the paper can be seen in Nature. It tells us:

…In 2006, Schweitzer and her colleagues found a skeleton from the hadrosaur Brachylophosaurus canadensis. The next year, the team returned to the field, removed about seven metres of earth, and extracted a femur still encased in sandstone. That was important, [Phillip Lars] Manning says, because “structural proteins like collagen are locked in the mineral lattice in the bone”. This serves like “a strait-jacket for the collagen”, he says.

…Schweitzer believes the methods her team used to extract and analyse the hadrosaur under sterile conditions may help to usher in a new era of paleontological field work — one where specimen scrutiny uses sterile techniques like a crime scene investigation.

One Creationist who claims to have some “recent” dinosaur bones is Buddy Davis. Rather than subject his findings to the kind of complex scientific tests that Schweitzer and her colleagues undertook, Davis has been content merely to write a popular paperback and to hawk his paradigm-shattering discovery around church meetings.

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