Bartholomew's Notes

Several months ago former MI5 whistleblower turned conspiracy-theorist David Shayler decided to follow the David Icke route, announcing the discovery of deep spiritual mysteries and declaring himself to be the reincarnation of Jesus. Given the rather jokey way he made this revelation – “I’m Brian and so is my wife: The Messiah is to hold a press conference this week” – one wonders if this was some kind of send-up; other conspiracy theories have also been suggested, in which he is still working for MI5 to discredit criticism of the Iraq war and the supposed “truth” about 9/11, or has been brainwashed to achieve this purpose. Most likely, I would hazard, Shayler is masterminding a conspiracy to avoid getting a proper job.

His latest ramblings, however (see below), are rather less jokey:

…The New World Order is not just a political force, the New World Order uses the dark side. We know this from the extensive testimonies to things like Satanic abuse. These are not things you’ll read about in the mainstream media, but I assure you, if you go in the internet you’ll find ample, well-researched evidence there.

What’s more chilling: the attempt to resurrect a conspiracy theory which resulted in ruined lives and blighted childhoods in the 1980s and 1990s, or the fact that a man who believes citing “the internet” counts as an authoritative source was once employed in a position of responsibility? But that’s not even the half of it:

…That New World Order, using those dark forces, has tried to convince us that Jesus came 2,000 years ago and changed nothing, or that Jesus didn’t come at all, or that he came but he wasn’t divine.

But who exactly has tried to convince us of this? Does he mean certain Biblical scholars of various kinds? Or does he mean Unitarians or Mormons or Muslims, since these religious traditions reject the idea of the Trinity? Or does he mean the group hinted at here:

…Taking my cue from Jesus in the Bible, the first thing I’m going to say and do is turn the tables on the money-lenders. And I say to every government in the world, print your own money…Until now, every country in the world has been controlled by a central bank. We know from documents like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion that they were going to use the money supply to create recessions and depressions, and that’s exactly what they have done throughout the twentieth century and are doing now, basically.

I suppose it should be remembered that not all conspiracy theories that use the Protocols are aimed against Jews; the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail authors concocted an alternative yarn connecting the document to a Masonic “Priory of Sion” (Of course, this is also nonsense, as well as being irresponsible and in bad taste). However, Shayler makes no attempt to clarify what he means, and coming after his garbled evocation of Jesus overturning the tables of the moneychangers, one is inclined not to give the benefit of the doubt.

Many of us can remember David Icke’s debut as a spiritual guru in 1991, when he became a figure of national mirth for his bizarre prophecies and pronouncements (Shayler, by the way, promises us the universe will “change shape” in 2012). A few years later, Icke was featured in a documentary with Jon Ronson, and he came across as a rather sad figure – wheeling his suitcase around the UK and the USA and speaking to small groups of cranks, when he had once enjoyed a high-profile career as a BBC sports reporter. A more recent documentary, in contrast, showed us queues of people eagerly waiting to fill medium-sized London venues where Icke was due to appear. Perhaps Shayler saw the same programme, and decided to see if he could win at the same game.

(Hat tips: Harry’s Place, The Nation of Duncan)

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Back in 2004 (see here), Ted Baehr of the Christian conservative “Movieguide” and of WorldNetDaily thundered against the film Kinsey, which he alleged whitewashed a monstrous figure responsible for corrupting American society. Beahr urged us to consider the evidence provided by his friend Judith Reisman, who had proven that the historical Kinsey had had a strange sex life and therefore that all his data was worthless. Baehr also claimed that Reisman had been deliberately excluded from previews of Kinsey, and he found this particularly reprehensible.

In 2008, however, Baehr is more than happy to endorse the idea of selective pre-screenings for a film more to his liking. Over to his latest column at WorldNetDaily:

Atheists are enraged. The politically correct academic nomenclature is upset. A reporter in Florida even posed as a minister to sneak into a church screening to stop actor, pundit and financial guru Ben Stein’s new movie about the totalitarian attempts by Darwinian scientists to suppress dissent, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.”

Baehr is referring to the case of Roger Moore (no, not that one), film critic for the Orlando Sentinel. Moore received an invitation to a screening, but when the invitation was revoked he decided to attend anyway – and avoided signing a non-disclosure agreement. He did nothing to attempt “stop” the film, and he did not “pose as a minister” (that embellishment appeared after the review was published). He did, though, write a harsh review – details can be seen on his blog. Presumably Baehr, who raged against Fox over its alleged treatment of Reisman, approves of Stein’s strategy of controlling who gets to see the film before its general release, and of holding soft-ball press conferences.

This is far from being Baehr’s first dip into the waters of hypocrisy – last year he denounced violent films for inspiring the Virginia Tech massacre not long after presenting an award to Chuck Norris.

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An important case reported in the San Francisco Chronicle:

A federal judge said Friday she’s inclined to dismiss a lawsuit by conservative radio talk show host Michael Savage against a Muslim rights group that reprinted his attacks against Islam and called for an advertising boycott.

Savage sued the Council on American-Islamic Relations in December after the organization posted excerpts from an Oct. 29 broadcast in which he called the Quran a “hateful little book … a document of slavery” and said, “I don’t want to hear one more word about Islam. Take your religion and shove it.”

His lawsuit accused the group of violating Savage’s copyright by posting more than four minutes of excerpts on its Web site without his permission. He also claimed that the group was engaged in racketeering, saying it poses as a civil rights organization but is actually a “mouthpiece of international terror” that helped to fund the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Savage’s vulgar and tedious anti-Muslim rants have been part of the US scene for several years; Salon profiled him a while ago here. WND has more of the quote highlighted by CAIR:

I’m not gonna put my wife in a hijab. And I’m not gonna put my daughter in a burqa. And I’m not getting’ on my all-fours and braying to Mecca. And you could drop dead if you don’t like it. You can shove it up your pipe.

This is fairly average from the man whom Brigitte Gabriel’s American Congress of Truth describes as “the best in the fight against IslamoNazism” (I blogged on Gabriel, and noted her October visit to London, here. She is particularly popular in Christian Zionist circles).

Savage claims this was taken “out of context”, and he raised money from his listeners to fund the copyright lawsuit. Savage claimed that this was about defending his free speech in the face of CAIR’s call for a boycott, which is a rather strange interpretation of the first amendment. Perhaps realising this (a) looked ridiculous and hypocritical, (b) would be detrimental to “fair use” provisions in American free speech, and (c) very likely to fail anyway, he opportunistically added the racketing charge at a later date. And sure enough, now that the lawsuit has been thrown out, his supporters are whinging about a “victory for terrorism”.

CAIR put forward a useful precedent on the issue:

Thomas Burke, a lawyer for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said at the hearing that the organization was entitled to excerpt Savage’s words for fundraising purposes. He cited a 1986 ruling by the federal appeals court in San Francisco allowing the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s organization to use copyrighted material in a Hustler magazine parody of Falwell to generate contributions.

However, the judge – now on the receiving end of abuse from Savage’s supporters – has allowed the radio host to re-file an amended suit.

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From the Daily Mail:

A branch of the Freemasons secret society is being formed by members of the Royal Household and police who protect the Royal Family.

And their decision to call it The Royal Household Lodge has put them on a collision course with Buckingham Palace – as has their plan to co-opt the royal cipher – EIIR – for their regalia, to underline their connection to the Queen.

…Author and broadcaster Martin Short, whose book Inside The Brotherhood exposed Masonic practices in the UK, said: “It’s a catastrophic time to start such a lodge, given all the problems facing the Royal Family at present.

“The Royal Family is desperately trying to prove it is modernising – in PR terms, this is bad news for them.”

As it happens, I read Inside the Brotherhood (1989) not long back – although it is packaged by the publisher as a sensationalist exposé and some of the chapter titles tend toward the lurid, in fact on the whole the book avoids conspiracy-mongering and where it explores abuses these are seen more as due to the complacency and institutional failings of an unaccountable leadership rather than as the outworking of some sinister grand design (at least, as regards British Freemasonry: the book also covers the Italian P2 business). Given what we now know about how institutions work when they are not under public scrutiny, this is quite believable.

Members of the royal family have been involved with Freemasonry for a long time, and today the “Grand Master” is the Duke of Kent, a cousin of the Queen – Prince Philip went through some Masonic initiations to please his father-in-law, but he has shown no interest since (The back of St James’s Palace, by the way, is just over the road from one of the main Masonic centres in London: Mark Masons’ Hall, a grand but much more discreet building than the headquarters of the United Grand Lodge of England near Covent Garden. Mark Masons’ Hall has featured on this blog before, as the venue for the right-wing Right Now! conferences).

I’ve actually met a few Masons over the years, and it’s clear that for them the organisation is a harmless social club with a strong civic conscience. However, one can also appreciate the concerns of Palace staff quoted by the Mail:

Non-members in Royal service are said to be fearful they will be overlooked for prestigious promotions and left unsupported in any below-stairs clashes.

…A Palace insider said: “There’s a lot of consternation and rightly so. People fear a lot of business will now be conducted behind closed doors so that those who don’t sign up to Freemasonry can’t have any effect on it.

“They are concerned that Masons will be preferred and those who aren’t Masons will be written out of the script.

“Backstairs life is already complicated enough – there are all sorts of allegiances and cliques and cabals. People fall in and out of favour and there’s a lot of whispering in ears…”

This is surely the main problem with a group which has been dubbed “the mafia of the mediocre”: not that it’s a grand conspiracy, but that when based around a place of employment a lodge constitutes a clique which undermines the measures that modern workplaces have put in place to counteract the all-too-human tendency to favouritism. The fact that women are excluded from Freemasonry (aside from some obscure affiliates) makes such lodges particularly undesirable, and distasteful.

Of course, the ideal is that a Freemason is interested in the pursuit of virtue rather than rank or status; Freemasonry purports to be a spiritual journey, and the symbols and rituals are supposedly designed to make an initiate aware of human imperfectability in relation to God. However, whether or not Masonry is sometimes abused for worldly advancement, one has to wonder about the attitude that is actually fostered by the organisation; it seems to me that some Masons revel in grand titles before and weird letters after their names, and in membership of exalted Masonic “Orders”, and one wonders how often such titles and hierarchies are actually substitutes for true inner maturity of character (I can think of some examples). One Christian criticism of Freemasonry is that some of the Masonic declarations, which gloat over secret knowledge unknown to outsiders, go against Christian ideals.

Freemasonry is, though, a fascinating subject and the pseudo-arcane rituals and preposterous mythology are fun in a “Dungeons and Dragons” kind of way. And while rejecting conspiracy theory, it is the case that certain lodges act as networks for individuals with particular interests, and so are worth keeping an eye on (just why, for instance, were the Right Now! conferences held in Mark Mason Hall?).

Despite Christian critiques of Freemasonry – which range from fundamentalist conspiracy theories through to more considered theological and ethical objections – Christian Freemasons see no conflict, and Freemasonry enjoys some support within the Church of England: Archbishop of Canterbury Geoffrey Fisher was an enthusiast, and there are services of thanksgiving in Canterbury Cathedral. Short’s book mentions a particularly exclusive lodge, the Kaiser-I-Hind Lodge (pp. 374, 571 in 1989 edition), which had as a member the secretary-general of the General Synod.

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A characteristically elegant piece by Jeff Sharlet puts the questions about religion that journalists ought to be asking the current crop of US presidential candidates:

Let’s take their faith seriously, as seriously as we take their foreign policy platforms and their health care plans. Let’s ask the toughest questions we can. Not, “Is Obama secretly a Muslim?”; that’s a stupid question. Rather, let’s quiz McCain on his new Baptist credentials, ask Hillary why she rejects the social gospel, demand that Obama explain how, exactly, he will be “guided by prayer” in the oval office, as he boasted in a mailer to South Carolina voters. All three present their Christianity as essential to their political identities. Great; let’s find out what they know about their Christianity. I propose this not as a boost to Hillary, who’s by far the most theologically literate, nor as a slam on McCain, who may not actually know that Baptists are supposed to have been, you know, baptized. Rather, I simply want to know what they know. How about a debate in which Hillary and Obama each explain how Revelation will help them make decisions?

Such questioning is unlikely to be edifying or enlightening, but previous use of this strategy has proven to be fun to watch:

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With Gordon Brown paying tribute to Rev Ian Paisley’s “huge contribution to political life in Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom”, this YouTube video reminds us of his contribution to political life in Europe:

Of course, the above bit of theatre is just one of the more clownish incidents in a long and ignoble history of religious bigotry and political extremism, which on the whole was not particularly funny. I’m sure Paisley’s retirement will unleash a tidal wave of anecdotes and analysis; Oliver Kamm notes one incident which shows us Paisley’s true character. Browsing through Martin Dillon’s God and the Gun is also instructive, and the book includes a discussion of one interesting association (p.220, date typo fixed):

Paisley…attended the launch of Ulster Resistance, at a secret paramilitary display in November 198[6] after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement. Several days beforehand, Paisley informed me that he could not undertake a broadcast at a scheduled time because he was due to attend a prayer meeting. The ‘prayer meeting’, in the Ulster Hall in Belfast, was in fact a paramilitary rally to launch Ulster Resistance with Paisley on the platform wearing a red beret. Ulster Resistance was later involved with the UFF/UVF in arms procurement when Paisley was no longer associated with it.

(The later arms procurement involved plotting in South Africa and arrests in Paris.)

Some months ago, Christopher Hitchens wrote a typically polemical piece, in which he explained that:

The British laws of libel forbid me to tell what I heard when I was a young reporter in the pubs and back streets of Belfast, but I’ll put it like this: Both Paisley and [Gerry] Adams know very well of things that happened that should never have happened. And both of them, in order to arrive at that smug power-sharing press conference, have had to arrange to seem adequately uninformed about such horrid past events. Both have been photographed carrying coffins at political funerals—funerals that were at one time the main cultural activity in each of their “communities.” One day, their private role in filling those coffins will be fully exposed. In the meantime, they are the recognized and designated peacemakers.

In the USA, Paisley was close to Bob Jones; a 2000 report from Jewish World Review reminds us of the details:

In 1966, two days after Paisley was released from prison [Paisley had refused to pay a fine for a public order charge – RB], Jones traveled to Northern Ireland to give Paisley an honorary degree from Bob Jones University. (Others who received Bob Jones honorary degrees around the same time were George Wallace, Strom Thurmond and Lester Maddox.)

…Paisley has made more than 50 trips to speak at Bob Jones University. On a 1981 trip, Paisley gave the opening prayer in the South Carolina House of Representatives. Catholics were outraged.

…Partly out of embarrassment, the administration decided to deny the incendiary Paisley a visa in 1982. Angry over this denial, Bob Jones Jr. called on G-d to smite Secretary of State Alexander Haig “hip and thigh, bone and marrow, heart and lungs.” Jones charged that the action by Haig, a Catholic, was “absolutely nothing but Catholic bigotry,” and for good measure he called Pope John Paul a “perfect example of anti-Christ.”

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(Minor correction added: see comments)

Oliver Kamm reports that Neil Clark has complained about him to the police:

Yesterday morning I got a telephone call from a bewildered gentleman at Abingdon Police Station saying he had received a complaint from a Mr Neil Clark. Mr Clark…is the author of such essays as “Milosevic, Prisoner of Conscience” and (regarding the Iraqi interpreters in fear of their lives) “Keep these Quislings Out”. He is also an imaginative theorist of global conspiracy…I learned from my interlocutor at Abingdon Police Station that Mr Clark was upset about disobliging references to him on the World Wide Web.

The police, who are obliged to investigate these kinds of complaints (Kamm stresses that there is nothing sinister in the police phoning him), appear to have concluded that there isn’t any case to answer.

Kamm has attacked Clark’s journalistic competence and honesty on a number of occasions; Clark believes this is sour grapes because he once wrote a critical review of a book Kamm had written. Since then, Clark has claimed there is a campaign of persecution against him, waged by “neo-cons” because of his anti-war views:

The perpetrators of this activity have a clear aim: to discredit me in the eyes of those who employ me and prevent me from earning my living as a journalist. They are also perhaps hoping that in the light of their constant, malicious attacks, I will decide that in order to have a ‘quiet life’, I will quit journalism. They could not be more wrong. Unlike them, my conscience is clear. The malicious attacks have only energised me and motivated me to work even harder to expose the lies and deceit which underpin the neo-con war machine.

Apparently Clark takes the view that while he has the right to publish controversial essays, any critical response is an attack on his free speech of a magnitude which should be compared (inevitably) with “Nazi Germany”. Here he is back in November at the Guardian:

Anyone who deviated from the official party line – as laid down by a self-appointed uber elite of British bloggers – faced a cyberspace lynch mob, more in keeping with Nazi Germany than a country which is supposed to pride itself on its support for free speech.

For the self-appointed uber elite of British political bloggers, the fact that someone, not of their number, and who did defy their three line-whip on the Iraqi interpreters issue – was nominated – and then won, in a free public vote, the title of “Best UK Blog” in the most prestigious prize in blogging, is too much to bear.

Sunny Hundal called my victory in the 2007 Weblog awards “bizarre”. Sunny has just started a blog which claims to be keen on democracy, yet he clearly doesn’t like it when people vote for someone whose views he does not approve of.

Clark at one point also issued a libel writ against Kamm, which was struck out by the court. Kamm now observes:

Possibly for this reason, after a sobering encounter with a leading libel lawyer whom I had retained for my defence and who rambunctiously explained to Mr Clark that his conduct represented an abuse of the legal process, he now prefers to waste police time at public expense.

Kamm has shrugged off Clark’s latest antics, and suggests that Clark’s writings are actions are “pathological”. While regretting the distress he has had to cause a troubled soul, he also makes the obvious point:

If you make your opinions public, then public scrutiny is what you will get (if you’re lucky).

While Clark is so far the only British blogger to have issued a libel writ against another blogger, he is not the only one to have made libel threats: as I’ve noted previously, the “libertarian” blogger Paul Staines has on more than one occasion made threats against bloggers (including, in one instance, demanding that the Liberal Conspiracy website remove a hyperlink to critical material, which is an area of British libel law not yet completely clear). Most recently, he roped in a blogger-solicitor ally named Donal Blaney in an attempt to make Tim Ireland reveal his home address.

The only case I’m aware of which comes close to Clark’s latest strategy against Kamm is a 2006 complaint to the police which the right-wing activist Mike Keith Smith made against a certain Ed Chilvers following an altercation on a discussion forum. The complaint was for “malicious communication”, but, according to Chilvers here, after making inquiries the investigating detective constable declined to proceed. As it happens, Clark was initially in part inspired to bring his libel action against Kamm by Smith’s victory in case he had brought against someone else.

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Kathryn Joyce has provoked a tirade from right-wing polemicist Don Feder for her Nation piece on conservative “demographic winter” alarm-sounding:

According to Kathryn Joyce, sneer-and-smear artist for The Nation, those who are concerned about the worldwide decline in birthrates are — to put it mildly — racist, neo-Nazis, who have a hidden agenda and (under the guise of demographic winter) are engaged in our age-old quest to control women’s bodies.

…Joyce believes — with the faith of one immune to facts and logic — that those sounding the alarm about plummeting fertility rates care only about the inability of white Europeans to replace themselves. We’re trying to whip up xenophobia against the continent’s rising Muslim tide. Thus, demographic winter is the invention of a vast Christian conspiracy to get Europeans to start making babies again.

Feder goes on to prove Joyce’s wrongheadedness by, erm… engaging in “sneer-and-smear” rhetoric, ignoring large factual chunks of Joyce’s essay, and giving us a conspiracy theory about Planned Parenthood:

Speaking of Nazis, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, their prophetess, considered non-Aryans “a great biological menace to the future of civilization.”

Ever wonder why blacks, who comprise 12 percent of the population, account for 32 percent of all abortions? (For Hispanics, the figures are 13 percent and 20 percent.) Might it have something to do with all of the abortion clinics conveniently located in inner-city neighborhoods?

The quote comes from Sanger’s The Pivot of Civilization (1922), in which the terms “Aryan” and “non-Aryan” do not appear – that comes from a gloss added on various conservative websites, from whence Feder doubtless plundered his reference. The “great biological menace” is actually named as “the hordes of irresponsibility and imbecility”. As a social Darwinist, Sanger was fearful that “the most responsible and most intelligent members of society are the less fertile; that the feeble-minded are the more fertile”. Incidentally, the idea that abortion clinics are involved in a conspiracy to exterminate African-Americans at the behest of Sanger’s master-plan was recently raised on WND, again by shameless quote-mining. Whatever one’s views of Sanger’s theories and legacy, it would be nice to see sources treated with due attention, especially in the age of Google Books.

Feder’s complaint –  if one navigates the rambling diatribe – seems to be (a) that Joyce cannot refute the fact that in certain countries the population really is decreasing; (b) that she suggests the fear over depopulation in the West in some cases has racial overtones and (c) that she explores the religious and ideological underpinnings of those who are worried about this, which amounts to a “conspiracy theory”.

Point (a) wasn’t the subject of Joyce’s article, so is hardly relevant, while (b) is backed up with evidence, such as this:

Elizabeth Krause, an anthropologist and author of A Crisis of Births: Population Politics and Family-Making in Italy, tracked that country’s population efforts over the past decade and found politicians demanding more babies “to keep away the armadas of immigrants from the southern shores of the Mediterranean” and priests calling for a “Christian dike against the Muslim invasion of Italy.” The racial preferences behind Berlusconi’s “baby bonus” came into embarrassing relief when immigrant parents were accidentally sent checks for their offspring and then asked to return the money: the Italian government hadn’t meant to promote those births.

On point (c), Feder whines in bold

Joyce has religion on the brain (As a child, perhaps she was bitten by a Gospel singer.)…The documentary’s experts are overwhelmingly academics — demographers, sociologists and a Nobel laureate in economics — from institutions like the University of Chicago and University of Virginia. Most of the scholars don’t think of themselves as particularly religious.

Yes, but again, what’s that got to do with the point of Joyce’s article, which is about the various personalities and organisations raising the alarm over “demographic winter”? And it’s not as if she ignores the point anyway – she notes the role of centre-left Democrat Phillip Longman, and she tells us that another writer is a “compelling conservative historian who uses secular arguments to craft a social science rationale for the necessity of large patriarchal families”. Of course the article dwells on the religion element: it’s central to the story, and Joyce – who has a background in religion journalism – is particularly attuned to it. Why does Feder object to it being talked about? Could it be that because he’s a one-dimensional party hack he can’t understand an outsider looking at a movement and being both critical and seriously engaged?

Feder is particularly angered at Joyce’s discussion of the World Congress of Families, with which he is associated, and its activities in Poland. Joyce notes how one speaker,

lecturing against contraception, told the largely Polish audience that birth control was a continuation of an old evil, child sacrifice–a fraught evocation in post-Holocaust Poland, where anti-Semitic slurs against the nearly destroyed Jewish population, including the old blood libel charging Jews with ritual child murder, are far from forgotten. The inference isn’t much of a stretch in a country where the government blames shadowy “webs of influence” for Poland’s lagging economy; where sociologists describe a widespread conceptualized anti-Semitism that casts gays, feminists and secularists as symbolic “Jews” in a country with few actual Jews left; and where Jews are blamed for Communism and abortion, both of which are widely reviled.

I’ve covered anti-Semitism in Poland on this blog a number of times (and on the WCF in particular here). However, Feder – having accused Joyce of being “immune to facts” – has a riposte:

On my two visits to Poland, I saw no signs of anti-Semitism.

I blogged on Feder back in 2004, when his absurd “Jews Against Anti-Christian Defamation” was first announced by ASSIST Ministries. Whether by mistake or not, it was originally named as “Jews Against Christian Anti-Defamation”, so I had a bit of fun with the title. I also noted Feder’s profile, which he has since taken down. Here’s a reminder:

I’m to the right of Sharon on Zionism, to the right of Pat Buchanan on immigration and Americanism, to the right of Mother Angelica on abortion, to the right of Chuck Heston on Second-Amendment rights, and generally make the legendary Atilla look like a limousine liberal.

You also make Cal Thomas look like a half-honest and careful journalist by comparison.

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From the Caucus blog of the New York Times:

Senator John McCain got support on Wednesday from an important corner of evangelical Texas when the pastor of a San Antonio mega-church, Rev. John C. Hagee, endorsed Mr. McCain for president.

…Mr. McCain, who has been on a steady search for support among conservative and evangelical leaders who have long distrusted him, said he was “very honored” by Mr. Hagee’s endorsement. Asked about Mr. Hagee’s extensive writings on Armageddon and about what one questioner said was Mr. Hagee’s belief that the anti-Christ will be the head of the European Union, Mr. McCain responded that “all I can tell you is that I am very proud to have Pastor John Hagee’s support.”

This is no surprise; as I blogged at the time, McCain took part in Hagee’s virulent Christians United For Israel conference in July, which also gave a platform to Brigitte Gabriel, one of the most foully abusive of Muslim-haters to enjoy some sort of serious reputation (I blogged her here). Then as now, here’s Hagee in all his “New World Order” conspiracy theory glory (the words are his; the person who posted it to YouTube added the images and music):

(Hat tips: Pharyngula; Max Blumenthal for the Hagee video)

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And while we’re on the subject (see yesterday) of Korean Buddhist leaders and Rev Moon, Asia News reports from Nepal:

Korean Buddhist leaders who arrived last night in the city of Lumbini, birthplace of the ‘Awakened One’, came together in the wee hours of this morning to pray all day for peace in Nepal and the world.

…Called “Pilgrimage for World Peace,” the event is led by the famous Korean Buddhist leader Sun Mook Hye Ja, who told journalists that the pilgrimage to Nepal is meant to encourage peace in the world.

…The “Pilgrimage for World Peace” was organised by the Service for Peace and Korean Culture Center.

“Service for Peace” was founded in 2001 by Moon’s son Hyun Jin Preston Moon. It operates in a number of countries, and is based in Bridgeport. Rev Moon has taken a particular interest in Nepal of late, which I have blogged here.

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