Bartholomew's Notes

“Michael Savage Beats CAIR”, says Newsmax; “Michael Savage Wins Major Victory Over CAIR”, crows the American Chronicle. Both headlines spin news reported in WorldNetDaily that despite the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ success in fending off a lawsuit brought by Michael Savage over copyright and alleged rackeetering, Savage would not have to pay CAIR’s legal fees. Says Savage himself:

This is a huge victory for me, personally, but also for the rest of America who is afraid of this lawsuit-happy group of intimidators…CAIR tried to tell [Judge Susan Illston] in their claim that she ‘should get’ me, because they were all liberals…You have to read their sloppy claim to believe it. Now, people will not be afraid to file suits if they have a legitimate claim against CAIR or any other Soros-funded group…

As I blogged previously, CAIR had used clips of Savage’s radio rants against Muslims to urge an advertiser boycott (Savage’s abuse was so crude he made Walid Shoebat look classy), and Savage claimed copyright infringement. That had to fail under fair-usage provisions – as was demonstrated years ago in a case concerning Jerry Falwell’s use of materials copyrighted to Larry Flynt. Realising this, Savage opportunistically added a “racketeering” claim to his lawsuit, which allowed him to grandstand as someone opposing terrorist-supporters. Savage and WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah appealed to supporters to send in cash for what was confusingly called (given that Savage was the plaintiff) a “legal defense fund”. Despite promises to fight the case all the way to the Supreme Court, Savage dropped the case in August after Illston found against him – even though she gave Savage “leave to amend” the racketeering claim.

So why did Illston decline to award CAIR costs? Savage hints it is because Illston (whom he previously had called “a minion of the Bill Clinton crowd”) came to understand the dubious nature of CAIR, and this is why he can now claim “victory”. However, a look at the ruling – which is posted on Savage’s site – shows that Illston was simply applying precendent:

This Court has discretion under the Copyright Act to allow recovery of costs and attorneys’ fees by or against any party.

…While the Court agreed with defendants’ fair use argument, there were features of the decision which required analysis.

Having considered the standards set out by the case law, and considering the “pivotal” criterion of the purposes of the Copyright Act, this Court finds in its discretion that attorneys’ fees are not warranted in this case.

As she explains, she took her lead from the judgement in Fantasy, Inc. v. Fogerty, which is available here. Apparently this means that CAIR was unable to show that the lawsuit was actually frivolous or in bad faith, but no more than that. It’s not “a huge victory” for America, nor does it break any new ground for anyone else who wants to sue CAIR. But hopefully it’ll be enough to console all those who contributed to Savage’s fund to take the case to the Supreme Court. If there’s any of that cash left over from Daniel Horowitz’s fees, Savage can perhaps use it to fight another case, in which he is the defendant. Kron 4 reports:

Conservative radio talk show host Michael Savage has been sued in  federal court in San Francisco by a liberal film group for making an  allegedly baseless demand that YouTube Inc. take down one of its videos.

The video by Brave New Films was entitled “Savage Hates Muslims”  and criticized an Oct. 29, 2007, broadcast in which Savage made anti-Islamic  comments.

The video, posted on YouTube by the film group in January, was one  minute and 23 seconds long and contained a one-minute excerpt of Savage’s  comments during the two-hour show.

The excerpt included Savage’s comments that Muslims should “take  (their) religion and shove it up (their) behind” and should be deported,  according to the lawsuit filed by Brave New Films in U.S. District Court last  month.

…The lawsuit seeks financial compensation for the alleged harm to  Brave New Films’ free speech rights as well as an injunction barring Savage  and the network from any further legal action related to the vide.

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One of my old posts is getting some extra hits as a few dozen people look for Rev John Stanton, who appeared on the leaked BNP (alleged) membership list. Stanton was quoted in the South Essex Echo in March saying that “The BNP is very Christian-based”, although he quickly thought better of it following tearful appeals from family members. His photo now appears on the Sun‘s website, apparently either blessing a football or using it as an globus cruciger.

Stanton runs an obscure house church, as does the BNP’s best-known ecclesiastical supporter, Rev Robert West – whose “Christian Council of Britain” appears to be limping on with a new website but not much activity. A third Reverend on the list is a certain Paul Barker. According to the Wakefield Express:

The Rev Paul Barker, of Fox Court in Durkar, told the Express this afternoon: “I’m furious. I used to be on the mailing list but I have never been a member. I don’t know why my name has gone out on the list and I’m now considering the action I am going to take.”

The website of the British People’s Party – another fringe far-right party – includes a message allegedly from Barker on page dedicated to condolences on the death of the BNP’s founder John Tyndall:

A SHORT  PRAYER   FROM  REVD  PAUL BARKER    FATHER  GOD  WE  THANK YOU FOR THE  LIFE OF   JOHN TYNDALL  HE WAS  A TRUE  SOLDIER  OF   GOD  MAY OUR FATHER TAKE  HIM  UNTO HIMSELF    AMEN

Amusingly, this comes directly below an Odinist opining on how Tyndall is in Valhalla.

Barker is described by the Express as a vicar, and several media reports have mentioned a “Church of England vicar” on the list; however, there is no Paul Barker listed in Crockford’s, so I suspect he belongs to another denomination.

About half-a-dozen or so further persons on the list are identified as Christians, including one person who runs a British-Israelite group – this is the historically nonsensical idea that the peoeple of Britain are the true descendents of the Biblical Israelites.

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Ruth Ellen Gruber draws attention to some clueless bad taste:

LIve like Anne Frank, lovely Amsterdam attic apartment.

…Anne Frank apartment has a small roof patio at the back.The apartment comprises 2 rooms, 1 large and 1 small.

One has double bed and other 2 singles. The front room has a double bed and the back room has 2 single beds as well as the bath tub with shower which has low head high in the shower as the ceiling is slopped so not suitable for very tall people.

There is fully fitted kitchen and a separate WC

…Leidseplein the main square full of night bars and clubs as well as restaurants is also within walking distance along the canal making it a nice walk.

In a follow-up piece for the JTA, Gruber tells us that

…I informed a friend at the Anne Frank House about the ad and he assured me that the Anne Frank Foundation, which oversees the museum, would be taking action. The foundation has legal control over the Anne Frank name, he explained. No one can name anything Anne Frank without its permission.

She adds:

For many years I’ve written about how abstract ideas of Jews and Jewish culture can become commercialized commodities in European countries where few if any Jews live today. Clearly there is a correlation between the attempt to use Anne Frank to rent an apartment and the ways that Jews, Jewish symbols and Jewish stereotypes are used in other types of Jewish-themed tourist promotion.

That’s true enough, but I don’t think the lack of actual Jews living in these countries is the determining factor. Many American Christian Zionists also have “abstract ideas of Jews”, which is why Pastor John Hagee, despite his philo-semitism, couldn’t see the bad taste in opining about how God sent Hitler as a “hunter” to persuade Jews to establish Israel. And Jewish culture is also commodified and appropriated by some Christian Zionist groups, as I blogged here.

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I’m sure everyone is riveted by my continuing efforts (see here) to note developments in the “London Swinton Circle”, a right-wing British organisation dedicated to “traditional Conservatism and Unionism”. I first came across the group a couple of years ago when I was researching a related outfit called the “Springbok Club“, which campaigns for causes such as the return of white rule over Africa (“We want our countries back, and believe this can now only come about by the re-establishment of civilised European rule throughout the African continent”). Both groups are (or were, depending on perspective), run by Alan Harvey, who is British but who formerly lived in South Africa.

However, a few months ago, as was noted in the Guardian, some of Harvey’s political enemies on the right showed up a public meeting of the Swinton Circle and there was some unpleasantness. Certain members of the Swinton Circle objected to Harvey’s conduct, and a meeting was held at which it was decided to remove him from his position and to suspend his membership. Harvey’s response has been to ignore this and to carry on as chairman – and as he appears to be the only person with access to edit the original Swinton Circle website he would seem to be de facto unassailable, at least for now.

Harvey’s perspective on all this is given in a comment he left on my blog here. His enemies, meanwhile, have established a rival London Swinton Circle website, with a better domain name and swishier graphics (Harvey’s website uses a dated 1990s-era template). This new website features a letter addressed to Harvey about the decision to remove him:

The meeting was informed that your behaviour was almost without precedent in the history of the Swinton Circle. We say ‘almost’ as you caused a serious incident after the Simon Heffer meeting in September 2005 when you engaged in a furious and public row with Mike Smith…You are further requested that within one day of the receipt of this letter you remove from the web any pages or web pages which purport to represent the Swinton Circle or pretend to be the Swinton Circle, that you cease to refer to the Swinton Circle when advertising Springbok Club meetings and that you do not pass yourself as acting on behalf of the Swinton Circle or allow anyone else to do so.  Should you fail to take these steps the LSC committee will look at recommendations coming from within the committee that you be permanently expelled.  We will also take formal advice as to any steps that need to be taken beyond expulsion.

I have an idea for a happy compromise: Harvey should continue to run the London Swinton Circle, while the opposing camp should take the name “Swinton Circle of London”.

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Time reports that Mike Huckabee has a book coming out – and it looks as though the fiasco of Pastor John Hagee’s endorsement of McCain still has some legs to it, as Huckabee questions the spiritual intregrity of Christian Right leaders who backed rival Republican candidates:

Many conservative Christian leaders, who never backed Huckabee despite their holding very similar stances on social issues, are spared neither the rod nor the lash. Huckabee writes of Gary Bauer, the conservative Christian leader and former presidential candidate, as having an “ever-changing reason to deny me his support.”

…He calls out Pat Robertson, the Virginia-based televangelist, and Dr. Bob Jones III, chancellor of Bob Jones University in South Carolina, for endorsing Rudy Giuliani and Romney, respectively. He also has words for the Texas-based Rev. John Hagee, who endorsed the more moderate John McCain in the primaries, as someone who was drawn to the eventual Republican nominee because of the lure of power. Huckabee speaks to Hagee by phone before the McCain endorsement, while the former Arkansas Governor is preparing for a spot on Saturday Night Live. “I asked if he had prayed about this and believed this was what the Lord wanted him to do,” Huckabee writes of his conversation with Hagee. “I didn’t get a straight answer.

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For some reason, there is a sudden flurry of interest on American websites in Stojan Adasevic, the Serbian former abortionist who became a pro-life advocate some years ago. Adasevic, now an Orthodox Christian, explains that he had a change of heart following a series of strange experiences, beginning when he was a student:

Stojan Adasevic will never forget the day he was organizing the filing cabinet in the doctors’ room. He was a medical student at the time… A number of gynecologists entered the room. Paying no attention to the student crouched over a pile of papers in the corner, they began swapping stories about their medical practice…As the gynecologists went on discussing [one] woman’s history, Stojan, who had been listening in, suddenly stiffened. He realized that the woman under discussion — a former dentist at the nearby clinic — was his mother.

This apparently did not deter him from his career path, but while performing “between 48,000 and 62,000” terminations (up from “10,000” in this 2002 article), Adasevic began to have nightmares in which children and young people fled from him and called him a murderer. A “man in black” introduced himself as Thomas Aquinas – of whom Adasevic says he had never heard – and asked:

“Do you not know that here, on this side of the eschaton, children continue to grow?” The Doctor refused to yield: “But I have never killed a twenty-year-old boy”. “You killed him twenty years ago” replied the monk, “when he was three months old”.

After this, Adasevic claims to have performed an abortion in which

…upon withdrawing the forceps, now certain that he had reduced everything to a pulp, he produced a human heart! The organ was still beating.

Aquinas had written on fetal development in the Thirteenth Century. Many sources summarise his argument; here’s one:

In his Summa Theologica he divided the powers of the soul between “sensitive” and “vegetative.” In the section of that work labeled Question 118, “Of the Production of Man from Man as to the Soul,” he delcared that the vegetative soul exists from the moment of conception, but the sensitive soul, which is not procreated but rather created anew with each person, cannot be transmitted within the semen…He maintained that at approximately the end of the first trimester, when the soul enters the fetus, the fertilized ovum first becomes a full human being. (1)

Aquinas also argued that abortion before this period was still sinful, although not the same as homicide, and the “sensitive” soul entered later for females than for males – Adasevic believes Aquinas erred in following Aristotle on this rather than taking conception as the beginning of human life.

Adasevic repudiates Milosevic, and claims that the slaughter of the Balkans War was due to the “lack of respect for human life” that abortion engendered. However, a couple of 1993 quotes attributed to him  suggest a nationalist perspective. First, there’s this:

In order for the nation to survive, every woman must bear at least three children… “Those groups who praise free and planned parenthood, and the unchallengeable right of a woman to abortion, should not forget that in a state subject to the rule of law no one is the master of his own body, whether male or female. A woman must bear herself a replacement, and a man must go to war when the state summons him. (2)

Further thoughts appear in a letter re-posted here:

the feminists’ agenda did not really seek to free women from the hands of illegal abortionist, but rather, their aim was to assist the biologic destruction of Christians. When the enemies of Serbian people could not manage to destroy us by other means, they decided to do it by biologic means…they don’t fight at all to free women from the hands of illegal abortionists, but, in fact, they fight for the biologic destruction of Orthodox and especially Serbian people. (3)

Further religious context is provided in this 2004 piece from the Women’s Heath Research Network:

The Serbian Orthodox Church, as the religious community that constitutes the majority in Serbia and Montenegro insists on the need for increasing the birth rate and diminishing reproductive rights (particularly abortion)…The sovereign right of the woman to decide on abortion ought to be abolished, whereas the right of the state should be increased and the right of the father to decide about his posterity should also be introduced. Gynecologist Stojan Adasevic speaks in the same spirit and has also published a book called The Sanctity of Life, with the financial support of SPC [The Serbian Orthodox Church]. According to Adasevic, the problem lies in the moral and ideological approach to childbearing and sexuality. The concept that the aim of the sexual drive is reproduction, not pleasure, ought to be firmly established, as well as the notion that this drive is closely bound to an ultimate duty towards oneself, one’s environment, one’s nation and the state.

****

(1) William Petersen, From Persons to People: Further Studies in the Politics of Population, Transaction Publishers, 2003, pp. 113-114.

(2) Apparently this appeared in Vreme, 19 April 1993, p. 55, and is cited in Wendy Bracewell, “Women, Motherhood, and Contemporary Serbian Nationalism,” in Women’s Studies International Forum, 19 (1/2), 1996, p. 28.  Bracewell’s article in turn is cited by Jeremy Shiffman, Marina Skrabalo, and Jelena Subotic, “Reproductive Rights and the State in Serbia and Croatia”, in Social Science & Medicine, 54 (4), 2002, pp. 625-642. Bracewell calls him a “demographer”, but I’d be very surprised if it’s a different person.

(3) According to the website, this was published in Intime, p. 44 and Politika Ekspres, 28 September, 1994, p. 14.

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A pearl of spiritual advice from Abbot Ephraim (var. “Abbot Efrem”), the Abbot of the monastery of Vatopedi (var. “Vatopedion”, “Vatopediou”) on Mount Athos in Greece:

‘Athonite monasticism is both a signpost to Heaven and a bridge over which pass true spiritual provisions for the world.’

Perhaps those “spiritual provisions” include cheap land in Greece that once belonged to the church and has passed to the Greek state, in return for which the monastery has received some more valuable real estate. From the New York Times:

A scandal over more than 250 questionable land swaps is threatening to bring down the Greek government and tarnishing a storied Greek monastic society.

Two government officials have already resigned over the dealings, in which a wealthy Orthodox monastery traded cheap tracts of lakeside property for prime public real estate, including a housing venue for the 2004 Athens Olympics. An initial judicial inquiry put the loss to the state at $136 million.

Revelations by the news media of the deal details and grainy pictures showing government officials hobnobbing with Abbot Ephraim…have drawn furious accusations of corruption and breach of faith…

Ephraim, however, is unrepentent – Kathimerini reports:

Despite the intervention last week of a court inspector who found that 270 hectares of land around Lake Vistonida in northern Greece should never have been given to the Vatopedi Monastery, the latter has issued a statement saying that it is still entitled to the land. In a memorandum that was also sent to Ecumenical Patriarch Vartholomaios, the monastery’s head monk Ephraim claims that Vatopedi acted completely within the law when it swapped property with the state and that it is the legal owner of the land.

“Vartholomaios” is the Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew. The Archbishop of Athens has been quick to distance the Greek Church from the scandal:

The head of the Church of Greece, Archbishop Ieronymos, said he was “astounded” by the controversial land deal…The monastic community comes under the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul and, as such, Ieronymos is powerless to take any action. “The Church of Greece has no authority over Mount Athos, just at Mount Athos has no authority over the Church of Greece,” he said.

Ephraim is from Cyprus, and his brother Nikos Koutsou (var. “Nicos Koutsou”) is a politician there. According to the Cyprus Mail:

As the story unfolded, attention became focused on Koutsou after a letter, allegedly from a group of Mount Athos monks to the Greek parliament, which condemned the actions of the Cypriot abbot.

It also alleges that Efrem used, and continues to use monastery finances to fund Koutsou’s political career.

Koutsou questioned the existence of the alleged group of monks.

“Politically speaking, I have to say that it is only political dummies who, instead of having the courage to find reason to oppose me openly, hide behind a group of mentally ill people in order to attack their political opponents,” Koutsou said at a news conference yesterday.

Koutsou claims this is a ploy to discredit opponents of the 2004 UN peace plan for Cyprus. Ephraim is also under fire over another matter:

…This week , the monastery’s Cypriot Abbot, Father Efrem, has ordered confectioner Giorgos Thrasivoulidi to vacate the premises of his business, which have come under the ownership of Vatopedi.

During his last visit to Cyprus in 2007 Efrem visited the owner of Morello patisserie in Paphos with his financial adviser, informing Thrasivoulidi he was being evicted, as the Monastery planned to build an office block where his business is located.

Speaking to the Cyprus Mail yesterday, Thrasivoulidi said he objected to the eviction, pointing out that his lease contract did not expire until 2010, and threatened that legal action would be taken.

The Vatopedi monastery has a celebrity reputation, and Prince Charles has made a number of visits; Bloomberg News profiled Vatopedi, and Mount Athos in general, in 2005:

…Long before global paladins such as Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Citigroup Chief Executive Charles Prince embarked on their annual pilgrimage to Davos, Mount Athos was celebrated as the Western world’s most fashionable retreat where leaders came to ponder their souls and the state of the world.

…”Deciding on a monastery is a metaphysical management decision,” is how [Fund manager George Karaplis, the former chief financial officer of Hellenic Telecommunications Organization] describes the process of selecting a retreat. “The spirits, God, call it what you want, tell you what monastery to go to.”

“Every CEO needs to visit Mount Athos,” the 48-year-old fund manager adds. “I’ve accompanied senior executives from Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley, but the privacy of the experience, the transformation these men experience on Mount Athos prevents me from revealing their names.”

…”Vatopediou is the original [World Economic Forum],” explains Karaplis, who since 1991 has made 70 pilgrimages to Mount Athos.

…”I’ve spent hours listening to professionals, businessmen and politicians,” Father Irenaios recalls after an evening meal of grain and mountain grasses. “All of them have great problems in focusing on what is important. They all come to Vatopediou with a need to understand the difficulties they face in work and in their lives.”

Filling small glasses with a fiery eau de vie called “tsipouro,” Father Germanos, the deputy abbot, nods in agreement and adds, “All businessmen come to Vatopediou feeling a great emptiness.”

Maybe that “transformation” was a two-way affair…

The Greek Church was mired in a series scandals in 2005 that encompassed, according the Guardian, “skulduggery, sexual improprieties, trial rigging, drug and antiquities smuggling”. One newspaper published every tabloid editor’s dream: “photographs of a 91-year-old bishop naked in bed with a nubile young woman”.

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Palestinian Christian Zionist Walid Shoebat’s handler Keith Davies explains what the election of Obama means:

From: Shoebat.com
Date: Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 11:00 AM
Subject: America’s challenges and next move forward

…pure vitriolic anti semitism will return over the rights and saftey of Jews in America. This is the “change we can believe in” and it is coming quicker than any of you can imagine…America voted for the man who will probably cause the worst plight for the Jewish people since the Holocaust…

So what can we do? Davies has the answer: send him and Shoebat some cash:

Walid and the Walid Shoebat Foundation will fight against the coming storm. We need your help morally and physically, with the staging of events nationwide and financial donations, so we can protect America and Israel, speaking for freedom and the rights and values that all Americans, even the misguided ones who voted with their hearts and not their minds this time.

This is shameless. More Shoebat and Obama fun here.

Meanwhile, Shoebat’s chum Hilmar Von Campe makes the same point he always makes, which is that Nazis are everywhere:

Because it has abandoned moral absolutes and its historic Christian faith, the U.S. is moving closer to a Nazi-style totalitarianism, warns a former German member of the Hitler Youth in a new book.

“Every day brings this nation closer to a Nazi-style totalitarian abyss,” writes Hilmar von Campe, now a U.S. citizen, and author of “Defeating the Totalitarian Lie: A Former Hitler Youth Warns America.”

…”Today in America we are witnessing a repeat performance of the tragedy of 1933 when an entire nation let itself be led like a lamb to the Socialist slaughterhouse. This time, the end of freedom is inevitable unless America rises to her mission and destiny.”

I blogged Von Campe here.

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Last night Channel 4 broadcast Saving Africa’s Witch Children, as part of its Dispatches strand. The programme focused on children accused of being witches by Pentecostal pastors in Akwa Ibom state in the Niger Delta area of Nigeria, and the work of the Child Rights and Rehabilitation Network. Several pastors were featured, including Helen Ukpabio, who has featured on this blog several times in the past, most recently here. The problem makes for grim viewing: we see children who have been horribly mutilated, and in one case left brain damaged after having had a nail driven through her skull; others appear withdrawn and tearful after being rejected by their families and threatened. We also see the hostility of aggressive and angry adults against the charity workers who challenge the witch teaching and offer support to children living rough.

The first pastor we meet is the rolex-wearing Bishop Sunday Ulup-Aya, who makes children drink a strange “poison destroyer” medicine made up of “African mercury”, his own blood, and pure alcohol. He explains, in a jerky and giggling manner, that

I have power here on earth that is bound in heaven…I killed up to 110 people who was identified to be a witch…We have 2.3 million witches and wizards in Akwa Ibom.

His services cost “400,000”.

Also featured are Prophetess Cecilia Udoyeo and Franklin Udoeyo, of the Covenant Global Mission. They have a group of subdued children in a room at the back of their church; the prophetess tells us that

In the night we have to tarry [i.e. fight] with them, so they may not go to the coven, so we have to tarry with them until it is 5 and we know they cannot move again. The Spirit of God has overwhelmed them. That is why we will allow them to sleep by daytime.

Franklin adds, regarding one girl:

She has grown up to a level of becoming a Queen in the coven, so one day the Lord helped me I was able to remove the crown, her power was removed.

The girl now sleeps in Franklin’s bedroom. Some of the children have been living at the church for three years.

Ukpabio herself is then featured, and we are treated to scenes from her Christian horror film End of Wicked, which shows witch children eating human flesh, flying around, and making an man’s eyes pop out. In 2000 only a few children were ever accused of witchcraft, but the upsurge since then – there are frequent arrivals at CRARN’s shelter – is blamed by a local community leader, Chief Victor Emet, on Ukpabio and her film. The filmmakers also visit a village where everyone has seen the film, and where a girl has been ostracised for witchcraft. The locals are outraged when the child is brought back into the village, one man smiling as he tells us “I want to kill that small girl”. Here’s an extract I found on Youtube:

Ukpabio, however, denies any responsibility:

Witchcraft is a problem all over Nigeria..I never hurt anybody. Be careful, mind your ways…We have about 150 churches in Nigeria. I am a voice in this country. So, a white man or a white woman cannot come into my country and say nonsense against me and mess up the whole situation.

She accuses the interviewers of not having seen her film, and demands to know why she is being targeted rather than J.K. Rowling. Ukpabio’s supporters have left similar defensive rants on this blog, as I noted here. And as for the Biblical basis of child witchcraft, Ukpabio tells us that

I can show you and teach you many places in the Bible.

The interviewers go on to meet Ukpabio’s denominational leader in the Pentecostal Fellowship, Apostle Dr Cletus Bassey, who is clearly an educated man. Bassey claimed not to know about Ukpabio’s films specifically, but agreed that such works are harmful:

We should be able to let our people know that that is not a true picture of what we should present, especially from our culture…It’s not presenting a true picture of a nation we are trying to build, it’s not presenting a true picture of children we are trying to raise, it’s not presenting a good picture of a society we are trying to sanitise. I think that such videos should be discontinued and should be discouraged. And we are doing everything in the Pentecostal circles to discourage such things, especially among those who because of money have tried to get themselves involced un issues like this.

Towards the end of the programme, children from CRARN protest outside the residence of State Governor Godswill Akpabio, one child poignantly telling the camera that

I want to ask the government to tell my parents I’m not a witch.

After some hours Akpabio agreed to see them, and he offered support and a (belated) promise to ratify the federal Child Rights Act. This law has now been adopted, but apparently ten children a week are still arriving at CRARN, and no pastor has yet been convicted.

One underlying social reason given for the upsurge in child-witch accusations is the juxtaposition of extreme povery with the obvious wealth of the Niger Delta oil industry. Also, the industry’s pollution of the environment has damaged the livelihoods of fishermen and others, to that there is a pervasive sense of things going wrong.

I’ve also blogged on child witches in Congo and on a minister famous for getting women to “confess” to being witches in Cameroon.

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Sunny Hundal, writing on Liberal Conspiracy in February:

Last week Tuesday Aaron linked to this blog post by Tim Ireland on Bloggerheads…Quick off the mark, although I didn’t read it until much later, I was sent an email by [Paul] Staines threatening to take me to court for the link. He was: “not minded to not pursue this just because you withdraw it at a later date.” That is quite a threat. I was asked to get in touch soon or else. “And I won’t leave the pistol in the holster this time,” he ended.

I cited this incident in a blog entry a few days ago. The blogger Staines (also known as “Guido Fawkes“) left a brief comment:

There was no threat to sue LibCon.

Tim now asks:

C’mon, Guido.

You made the claim. Can you back it up or not?

Sunny has emailed me from the USA to tell me he stands by the story.

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