Bartholomew's Notes

The Kampala New Vision reports:

Archbishop Henry Luke Orombi yesterday said he fears for his life because of the campaign he has waged against homosexuals.

“Nowadays, I don’t wear my collar when I am in countries which have supporters of homosexuals,” he said while addressing Christians at Kitunga archdeaconry, West Ankole diocese in Ntungamo district.

“I am forced to dress like a civilian because those people are dangerous. They can harm anybody who is against them. Some of them are killers. They want to close the mouth of anybody who is against them.”

I can see the problem: a black man wearing a clerical collar walking down a street in the USA or UK is bound to be identified as Bishop Orombi and then attacked by murderous homosexuals.

In fact, of course, being gay in Uganda is rather more dangerous than being an African cleric in countries with “supporters of homosexuals”. Doug Ireland noted in 2006:

The police in Jinja, Uganda’s second largest city, have “launched an operation to repress the gays, who were on the verge of winning the heterosexual generation of the district,” announced the September 7 issue of the popular sex-and-scandal tabloid daily newspaper Red Pepper under the screaming headline, “JINJA COPS HUNT FOR GAYS.”

The newspaper called on the public to cooperate in tracking down “sodomites” to prevent them from “polluting” the general population, published the photo of a young gay man who was said to have intimate links to a man already imprisoned in for homosexuality — which is punishable with life imprisonment in Uganda — and urged its readers to help track down the young man.

Meanwhile, in the UK, a Ugandan lesbian named Prossy Kakooza is seeking asylum after being raped by Ugandan police. However, Orombi denied there was a problem when he spoke recently to journalists at GAFCON:

HO: If you were for the Shogah in Kampala a few weeks ago the gay demonstrated in the country and they were not arrested. The gay led a press conference and they were not arrested.

And as for the Kazooka case:

HO: I would not believe a thing like that is done in the public knowledge of the people of Uganda because the gay people who are Ugandans are citizens of the country and we would cherish the fact that we would want to send it our people. For some of those things probably you get information in England and we may not even get information, I don’t know how they get their information.

At VirtueOnline, David Virtue complained that this was an “isolated” case raised by a “whiny” journalist. Whereas of course Orombi’s “fear for his life” claim isn’t whiny at all…

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…or just kept off the public programme?

Here’s the Christians United for Israel website from a few days ago, giving details of its upcoming “Washington-Israel Summit”:

 Here it is today:

Various questions have been raised in the media concerning Walid Shoebat’s self-described past; I’ve recently noted his bizarre Biblical exegesis and his past association with a website that denounced Catholicism, the Charismatic movement, and Billy Graham.

John Hagee, meanwhile, is keen for the CUFI “Israel Summit” not to become an embarrassment for Joe Lieberman,  and he has been asking YouTube to delete videos containing clips of his contorversial sermons.

(Thanks to Fred Clarkson for bringing this to my attention)

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21 May, from the London Metropolitan University website:

London Metropolitan University, yesterday presented His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama with an Honorary Doctorate of Philosophy.

…Speaking at the ceremony Brian Roper, London Metropolitan University Vice-Chancellor said: ‘We are delighted to welcome His Holiness the Dalai Lama to London Metropolitan University and recognise his work by conferring this honorary Doctorate on him. His Holiness the Dalai Lama is a worldwide figurehead and a man who has inspired countless people throughout his life. Today we honour him, not just for his leadership of his people, but also for his demonstration, through all his words and deeds, that peaceful means of resolution always remain possible.”

8 July, from the China Daily:

Britain’s London Metropolitan University recently apologized for bestowing an honorary doctorate to the Dalai Lama after the move drew intense criticism from a number of Chinese.

Brian Roper, vice-chancellor of the university, expressed in a letter to the Chinese embassy in London on June 16 his regret of his school’s move, saying that offering the degree to the Dalai Lama was not a well-considered decision, according to an embassy official last week.

Roper said the university is committed to keeping a good relationship with China and fully supports the Beijing Olympics.

Index on Censorship tells it slightly differently, but it’s still rather unedifying:

London Metropolitan University has expressed ‘regret’ at offence caused to China by it’s recent award of an honorary doctorate to Tibetan religious leader the Dalai Lama in May…A representative of the Chinese embassy in London confirmed to Index on Censorship that the letter of apology had come after the embassy had demanded it from the university.

UPDATE: Free Tibet has issued a press release:

The China Daily’s report has been emphatically rejected by London Metropolitan University. In an emailed statement received by Free Tibet Campaign, the university’s PR Officer, Irene Constantinides, confirmed that the Vice-Chancellor had met with officials from the Embassy but stated “London Metropolitan University has not apologised for making the award”.

She said in the statement that the vice-chancellor “expressed regret at any unhappiness” caused to the Chinese people by the award, but reiterated that the university “will not be apologising for the award” and that the reward would not be retracted…A full copy of the statement emailed to Free Tibet Campaign by London Metropolitan University can be seen on request.

I’d like to know how exactly one expresses regret without conceding any kind of apology.

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Just weeks before the 2008 Christians United for Israel “Washington-Israel Summit” with John Hagee and Joe Lieberman (Walid Shoebat is also on the bill), Bruce at Talk to Action reports that YouTube has removed videos containing extracts from Hagee’s controversial sermons:

Last week, on July the 1st, I received notice from YouTube that eight of my videos on YouTube’s website had been taken down, allegedly for copyright violations. The videos included the notorious “God Sent Hitler” video which caused sufficient scandal, because it got shown widely on American and international TV, to force John McCain to renounce the political endorsement of Pastor John Hagee. JHM Ministries also targeted videos from Max Blumenthal, from People For The American Way and even from a Christian fundamentalist ministry critical of Hagee’s “Prosperity Gospel” teaching. According to a Huffington Post story just posted by Sam Stein, in all over 120 videos were taken down at the request of John Hagee Ministries.

Stein himself tells us:

…as Blumenthal and Wilson note, claims that this was merely an effort to combat copyright infringement contain several, glaring holes. For starters, Hagee had complained but never sought legal recourse for past publication of his sermons. Moreover, Blumenthal’s work, while filmed at a Christian United for Israel event, was his own, not Hagee’s. “There was no copyrighted material because it was me reporting on a public event,” he said.

Even [Hagee PR man Juda] Engelmayer admitted that he didn’t know how Blumenthal’s particular work “fit the criteria” that the lawyers used. “But if he puts it up [on YouTube] again, I’m almost positive it won’t be challenged.”

Hagee certainly doesn’t have a case: the clips appear in videos created for the purpose of criticism, and so amount to fair usage. Back in March Michael Savage lost a copyright suit against CAIR after CAIR used some of his anti-Muslim ramblings for its own purposes; in 1986 a court agreed that none other than Jerry Falwell could use material copyrighted to Larry Flynt.

One Hagee sermon has slipped through, though, in this video made by someone else:

PS: Note on Juda Engelmayer (sometimes spelt as “Juda Engelmeyer”): he works for a PR firm called 5WPR. According to The Jewish Week:

Fearing an onslaught of protestors, kosher meat giant Agriprocessors hastily changed a meeting planned for Tuesday afternoon in Midtown into a conference call….AfgriProcessors  took on the New York-based firm 5W, which also represents evangelical televangelist Benny Hinn, controversial Pastor John Hagee, the Trinity Broadcasting Network, the Zionist Organization of America and Israel’s Ministry of Tourism, among others, after the bad publicity following [an] immigration raid.

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Joel Richardson (author of Antichrist: Islam’s Awaited Messiah) has responded to my post concerning the Book of Revelation and the Codex Vaticanus, and once again it’s a gift.

To recap: Richardson’s associate Walid Shoebat had given a presentation in which he had claimed that the letters in Revelation 13:18 which are taken to be the Greek for “666” are in fact Arabic for “In the Name of Allah”, revealed to the author of Revelation in visual form by God in the First Century and misunderstood as Greek by later Christians. Shoebat claimed that he drew this conclusion after viewing the ancient Codex Vaticanus. I noted various shortcomings to this bizarre thesis, including the observation that the Codex Vaticanus does not contain the Book of Revelation. Richardson then wrote to me insisting that the Codex does indeed contain Revelation, showing me an 1868 facsimile edition of the text to prove it. He suggested I was in error because I had allegedly got my information from Wikipedia, and perhaps had been drinking beer before writing. Alas for Richardson, I pointed out that Revelation was tacked onto the end of the Codex in Italy in the Fifteenth Century, and was in no way a part of the ancient manuscript itself. Further, the 1868 edition does not include this fifteenth-century supplement, and instead provides a typeset version. I also pointed him to some scholarly resources.

Richardson’s response to all this is amusing. He argues I am still “in error” for some reason, and that I “look bad”; and further that I

tried to overplay a largely irrelevant oversight on Walid’s image sourcing (it is irrelevant it his larger point because the image he used is precisely like the Textus Receptus and the Byzantine Majority text or any other ancient Greek Mss)

But Shoebat’s whole argument was that by looking at an ancient manuscript he realised that Greek letters were not intended, whereas Greek letters certainly were intended in the “Byzantine Majority Text”. And besides, it seems that Shoebat did not apparently look at any “ancient Greek Mss” anyway! It seems that the way to admit to being wrong in the circles in which Richardson moves is simply to declare the issue to be “irrelevant” and to change the whole terms of the argument. Hence Richardson points me to a new site he has made, in which he uses the letters from the 1868 edition (which, by the way, he elongates and misleadingly labels as part of the Codex) as the basis for his comparison with the Arabic.

Richardson continues by demanding to know why

…do I not see you publicly renouncing the doctrine of death for Apostasy that is practiced throughout the Islamic world and endorsed by Orthodox Muslims?

As it happens, I have written plenty on Islamism and its unhappy consequences, but what that has to do with the issue at hand is unclear to me. Presumably the argument is that prioritizing truth and reason over hating Islam is morally deficient in some way, and that therefore my counter-arguments to the Arabic “666” can be discounted.

For easy reference, here are the relevant pictures:

(1) The oldest fragment of Revelation 13:18 we have, from the Oxyrhynchus Papyri (“616” rather than “666”, so the middle figure is different):

(2) The phrase as it appears in the Fiftheenth Century supplement to the Codex Vaticanus* (the “A.D. 350” designation is incorrect for this part of the text):

(3) The text as it appears in the 1868 typeset edition:

(4) The 1868 text as elongated by Richardson:

(5) The 1868 text as reproduced in Shoebat’s presentation:

Salem Kirban looks like a serious scholar in comparison.

*Thanks to a reader for confirming the provenance of this – I had originally doubted the designation.

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From Christopher Hitchens:

He continued to “see” [racial segregation as an accepted part of the world] as an adult…switching his party allegiance from Democrat to Republican in tune with the Nixon “Southern strategy” and famously deploying the “white hands” ad 20 years later, in which the genius of Dick Morris exploited the woes of the rejected white job seeker. That episode did get a mention in the [New York Times] obituary, but there was no recollection of Helms’ role in opposing the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, in protecting the apartheid state from the imposition of sanctions, or in defending white Rhodesia.

…Had it not been for Helms, it is unlikely that the United States would have become so fatally embroiled with the scabrous contras of Nicaragua. And probably nobody but Helms could have surveyed the situation in El Salvador in the 1980s and concluded that the problem with that small and tortured country was that its government was already too socialist.

From Billy Graham:

“Jesse Helms, my friend and long-time senator from my home state of North Carolina, was a man of consistent conviction to conservative ideals and courage to faithfully serve God and country based on principle, not popularity or politics.

“In the tradition of Presidents Jefferson, Adams and Monroe — who also passed on July 4th — it is fitting that such a patriot who fought for free markets and free people would die on Independence Day. As we celebrate the birth of our nation, I thank God for the blessings we enjoy, which Senator Helms worked so hard to preserve.

“Over three decades in the United States Congress, Senator Helms was a loyal and effective leader on behalf of our State, with whom I connected during times of national crisis…”

Helms also had his supporters in the UK; in 1985 a group of “libertarian” Young Conservatives headed across the Atlantic to meet the man for themselves.

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UK liberal hawk website Harry’s Place has been threatened with a libel action by the British Muslim Initiative over claims that the BMI’s president, Mohammad Sawalha, had railed against the “[evil Jew/Jewish evil] in Britain” in Arabic. Sawalha’s view was reported on the Arabic al-Jazeera website, which later changed the wording to “Jewish lobby in Britain” (without the “evil” bit), as if that were somehow better. Medyan Dairieh, who wrote the al-Jazeera article, complained in the comments that it was all down to a spelling mistake:

I wrote the report that has been misquoted, I mispelt one word in arabic, ????? instead of ?????? (lobby). The mistake renders the word meaningless in arabic and english except to people who can actually read arabic and posess intelligence who would understand the mistake to read as ‘lobby’. It is fairly obvious that the author of the piece we are discussing has a deliberate agenda, cannot read arabic and has no common sense…The only reference to jews as evil is on this site. Could you please get a grip. This is a non story.

That’s a rather casual way to admit to having made a disastrous error. The BMI responded with a press release, followed up with a legal threat:

Anas Altikriti, spokesman of BMI, commented earlier: “…This is another example of not only very basic incompetence at play, but pure evil that sees no shame or wrong in plainly lying for the purpose of demonising certain individuals and organisations, regardless of reality or facts”.

BMI have alerted its legal advisors to this matter and will be monitoring the blog-site in question as well as any quoting of this error by any other media outlet, and will be pursuing measures to bring those who do to account.

Harry’s Place does have a habit of spinning critics of Israel in the most negative way possible (in ways that I often find quite annoying), but this bombastic response is absurd.

However, as David T of Harry’s Place notes, a legal action will certainly fail. Sawalha has links with Hamas, so the disputed quote would hardly lower his reputation even if the “evil Jew” interpretation is wrong. Further, it seems to me that there there is a public interest in bringing the dispute to light, and the BMI have been allowed to put their side of the story.

Sawalha may have more luck suing Dairieh. I’ll even help him out by noting a precedent, from 1999:

THE SINGER and aspiring politician Patti Boulaye yesterday accepted pounds 15,000 libel damages and a public apology over The Guardian’s allegation that she was a supporter of apartheid… The journalist had misheard what Ms Boulaye said and had understood her to be saying “apartheid” when she was in fact saying “a party”.

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A comment arrives from Joel Richardson, author of Antichrist: Islam’s Awaited Messiah  (endorsed by Robert Spencer) and co-author of WorldNetDaily‘s new book Why We Left Islam: Former Muslims Speak Out (which I blogged here). Richardson is unhappy with my debunking of his associate Walid Shoebat’s claim that Greek number “666” in the Book of Revelation is actually the author’s attempt to write “In the name of Allah” in Arabic.

Shoebat claims that he realised this after consulting ancient codices, in particular the Codex Vaticanus. One point I made was that Codex Vaticanus does not contain the Book of Revelation (although it wasn’t my main point, and I did allow that Shoebat may perhaps have seen some other ancient manuscript, such as one that is doing the rounds online). Richardson blows his raspberry:

I went to the personal blog of the author of this article and saw that the image that he has posted of himself shows him sitting in a pub sipping a pint of beer. I fear that he may have been sipping a bit too much before writing this article.

The Codex Vaticanus does indeed contain the Book or Revelation, it is simply a later supplementation to the earlier manuscripts. A tiny bit of research could have produced this fact. The actual image of the portion of the Book of revelation that is part of the Codex Vaticanus is below. Scroll to the third column to the right and the top line, marked 18 (Revelation 13:18) contains the image that Walid used:

www.csntm.org/Manuscripts/GA%2003/GA03_150b.jpg

Images of the entire Codex may be viewed here:

www.csntm.org/Manuscripts/GA%2003/

Which could have been found if Mr. Bartholomew had gone here instead of sipping beer:

www.csntm.org/Manuscripts.aspx

Next time, you may wish to step outside of the usual Wikipedia sourcing for your articles Richard.

Actually, I researched this using various sources, such as The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism (1995):

Codex Vaticanus, a fourth century manuscript of the Greek Bible…All NT Scripture after Heb 9:14 is missing.

Other scholarly sources concur (Google Books is useful here). The older Catholic Encyclopedia gives some further background:

In modern times (fifteenth-sixteenth century) the missing folios were added to the codex, in order, as Tregelles conjectures, to prepare it for use in the Vatican Library.

Presumably this is the origin of the “later supplementation” that Richardson thinks in some way makes Shoebat’s case stronger; a supplement added 1,000 years later in Italy that in no way can be seen as part of the original codex. But there’s worse: the jpeg in fact shows a page from the 1868 Bibliorum Sacrorum Graecus Codex Vaticanus. This is a facsimile of the ancient text, but with a clearly typeset version of Revelation tacked on at the end. Here’s how the start of Revelation appears in the fifteenth-century manuscript compared with how it appears in the 1868 edition:

Incidentally, this “minuscule” way of writing Greek developed in the Seventh Century, and there are no examples prior to 835; the ancient Codex Vaticanus was written in an “uncial” form that looks more like block capitals (see Bruce Metzger, Manuscripts of the Greek Bible: An Introduction to Greek Palaeography, Oxford University Press 1991, and also this website).

So, Richardson is telling us that Shoebat used a nineteenth-century typeset edition of Revelation to draw the paleographic conclusion that a fourth-century Greek manuscript of the book (which doesn’t exist anyway) meant to show Arabic letters!

Let’s make this as simple as possible: if you read Revelation 13, it is obvious that the phrase for “666” appears where you would expect to see a number. The wider religious context here is numerology, which Shoebat rejects simply because he finds numerology objectionable. Early Christian tradition and manuscript evidence from long before Codex Vaticanus was written also both point to a number, either “666” or “616”. A fifteenth-century “supplementation” in a different script has no evidential value whatsoever, let alone a nineteenth-century typeset version!

Perhaps Richardson could do with a drink…

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As expected, the move to WordPress has revealed a legacy of rather dodgy HTML. The archive is likely to look rather untidy for a while. Blogroll and other frills to follow in due course.

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Following on from my examination of Walid Shoebat’s snake-oil Biblical scholarship a couple of days ago, I decided to check out his former collaborator, Simon Altaf. Altaf, who is based in the UK, explains his links to Shoebat on his “Abrahamic Faith” website:

Three years ago [2000] when I met Walid Shoebat, an Ex-Muslim convert from Bethlehem we started to discuss end times prophesy.  He was the one who enlightened me about real theology and eschatology of the Bible….I am an Ex-Muslim Convert of the dominant Sunni sect from Lahore, Pakistan.  I came to know the Lord Jesus Christ back in September 1998 after reading the testimony of an Egyptian convert while browsing the internet one day.  Later Walid and I both decided to create a website on the internet… to propagate the truth to the world about what is coming to pass.

Early versions of the “Abrahamic Faith” website state that Shoebat and Altaf founded it together. As well as pushing hardline Christian Zionism, it originally attacked other Christian groups, including Evangelicals and Charismatics, Billy Graham, and the Pope. They also wrote a book, This is our Eden, This is our End, and the above paragraph is taken from that. However, in a report in the Arab American News Shoebat’s handler Keith Davies suggests that a falling-out occurred:

Davies denies Shoebat is a follower of that fundamentalist branch of Christianity, or any branch, and is just trying to unite everybody, “Muslims, Christians, Jews together to bring peace.” He also denies any working relationship with Altaf, saying they once were friends and were going to write a book together.

After Shoebat wrote [This is our Eden], he decided he didn’t want to release it, which Altaf did without permission. Afterwards, the Shoebat Foundation asked to be removed from Abrahamic Faith, “because we didn’t agree with the stuff he was putting on his website,” Davies said.

Altaf and Shoebat founded the website in 2001, although they appear to have kept their full names off it for a while. A version of the site from 2002 tells us that

This site was founded by Walid and Shimoun, Ex-Muslims who discovered God’s love for Israel. They believe in the God of Israel (YHWH) who re-established Israel in her original land in 1948 as He promised in the Bible (Isa 66:8), they proclaim that the Messiah (Jesus of Nazareth) of Israel is Yahshua who died for Israel and the rest of the world and is coming soon. It is time for both Muslims and Jews to look at the Hebrew Scriptures. We are offering these numerous details explaining why the Bible alone is God’s eternal word.

When Altaf found Jesus in 1998 he was baptized into a Messianic Jewish group in London, and Messianic terms like “Yahshua” for “Jesus” appear throughout; in later versions, “God” becomes “G-d”. There is also an early version of Shoebat’s conversion narrative, in which he describes himself as having been involved in anti-Israel rioting during the Intifada, but which doesn’t mention any PLO membership or bomb-planting. This version of the story also tells us that Shoebat’s mother was a Christian, and that he was converted in 1992 after reading Armageddon, Appointment With Destiny, by Grant Jeffrey. On his own current website, Shoebat says he was converted after reading the Bible in an attempt to convert his wife to Islam.

In early versions of the website, Altaf and Shoebat took a hard line against various other Christian groups:

We reject any church or group that is a member of the World Council of Churches or its allied agencies, nor shall the mission or its agents ever become organically involved with ecumenical movements or projects. We reject Evangelicals and Catholics together as part of the falling away who teach false doctrines. We reject unscriptural emphasis on the “sign gifts” as essential part for evidence of salvation. We reject the Faith Theology Movements, Charismatic Catholics, Benny Hinn, School of Prophets, Toronto Blessing, Pensacola Florida, Rodney Howard Brown, Jack Hayford, or anyone similar or associated with these as part of a counterfeit revival.

There’s also a denunciation of “Billy Graham’s Love affair with the Pope”.

But why did they fall out? It seems that a couple of years ago Altaf became involved with the Bnai Yahshua Synagogue Florida, which is the home of Rabbi Moshe Yoseph Koniuchowsky, and Altaf was ordained by him as a Rabbi. Koniuchowsky is a controversial figure, and he has developed a movement called “Messianic Nazarene Yisrael”, which is distinct from Messianic Judaism. Koniuchowsky explains:

Messianic Judaism views saved gentiles as non Israelites, who have no Israelite blood whatsoever, having no legitimate claim to be physically descended from the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. They believe that any born again “gentile”, who claims physical descent from the patriarchs, either has a drop of Jewish blood from an ancient grandparent, or are just Jewish wannabe’s, engaged in delusion. Views the concept that any saved non-Jewish believer, could be a lost non-Jewish Israelite, as utter nonsense.

Messianic Nazarene Yisrael believes that most of the non-Jewish followers of Yahshua are Ephraimites, those who were scattered amongst the gentile nations starting in 721 BCE. They were the Lo Ami of Hosea one, who were not a people, but have now been restored as individuals as promised by the prophets, through Israel’s Messiah. These latter day “gentiles”, are washed and then awakened to their Israelite heritage by Messiah Yahshua, in fulfillment of many promises. Their recognition of their identity as the seed of Ephraim and their union with Jewish Israel, is a necessity for all Israel to be saved and for the Kingdom to be restored to Israel.

This claim that non-Jewish followers of Jesus have physical descent from Ephraim would be problematic to most Christian groups, as it appears to bring in a racial element. And historically, of course, it is even more preposterous than British Israelism. However, it’s not the only “Ephramite” group out there: I blogged on some others back in 2005. Various websites dispute Koniuchowsky’s theology, and raise questions about his identity. Koniuchowsky’s movement is international, and known as “Bnai Yahshua Synagogues Worldwide” (BYSW) – as well as Altaf’s Synagogue in London (Southall), there are apparently affiliates in Australia, Columbia, Cuba, India, Pakistan and Panama.

UPDATE: Shoebat explains his split from Altaf

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