Bartholomew's Notes

Belarus dictator Alexander Lukashenko, 2000:

On December 28, Alexander Lukashenko, who is planning to visit Israel on January 4-7, blamed the Jewish state for the “limited relations between the two countries.” “Although many Israelis are former Belarusian Jews and there are still 100,000 Jews remaining in Belarus, the two states have failed to build close or extensive mutual relations,” Lukashenko told reporters in Minsk. “It is the Israel side that is to blame. Everyone knows what kind of policy the West is pursuing toward Belarus,” Lukashenko added.

Belarus dictator Alexander Lukashenko 2007:

“Have ever been to Bobrusk, have you ever seen what state the city is in? It was terrifying to go inside, it was such a pigstye,” Lukashenko said in a statement supporting his government’s high priority on picking up trash and cleaning city streets.

“It (Bobrusk) was a predominantly Jewish city, and you know how Jews treat the places they live. Look at Israel, I’ve been there. I don’t want to offend any one, but they (Israelis) don’t try very hard that grass is neatly cut, not like in Moscow, among the Russians, among Belarusians.”

Back in 1995, Lukashenko complained that Israel was responsible for harming the economy of Belarus by encouraging a “brain drain”; after all, Jews wishing to get out of the country couldn’t possibly be his own fault. Similarly, it didn’t occur to him during his 2000 whine about Israel being “to blame” for a lack of friendship between the two countries that this might have had something to do with his 1995 rumination that

“Not all of Hitler’s actions were bad, one can learn from his methods of governing a country.”

Anti-Semitism in Belarus was highlighted back in August, when the Simon Wiesenthal Centre noted the distribution of several virulent publications by the Orthodox Initiative. However, the Jerusalem Post notes that Lukashenko has avoided anti-Semitic rhetoric in the past, and that the latest outburst points “not to a new crusade against Belarusian Jews but to a political calculation”, reflecting the country’s increasing alliance with Iran.

Across the border, the Russian Orthodox Church has been continually supportive of Lukashenko: Patriarch Alexei II praised the dictator’s support for “Christian enlightenment and moral health of society”, and presented him with the Order of St. Sergius of Radonezh “for strengthening unity of Slav peoples”. In June the Patriarch bestowed the order of St Vladimir of the First Degree.

Once again, here is one of those banned anti-Lukashenko cartoons:

 (A book-length history of Jewish Bobruisk can be found here)

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UK judge rules on “messages which are barely defamatory or little more than abusive or likely to be understood as jokes”

For bloggers in the UK, there are a number of issues concerning legal liability for comments left by readers. If a comment contains material that may be libellous, does the blogger have a responsibility to remove it, even before a complaint has been made? If so, within what timescale? What happens if a comment appears while a blogger is away on holiday – or perhaps is posted to an old blog which he or she no longer maintains? What if a blog gets so many comments that constant monitoring is impossible? And does removing a comment even help anyway, since publication for just a few seconds is still publication? Nobody really knows the answer, which is why libel law reform is such an urgent priority (in the meantime, Oliver Kamm notes the existence of a company which offers a third-party location at which comments can be hosted).

Another question is whether bloggers should comply if they receive a demand for information that might reveal a poster’s identity. A recent court ruling offers some guidance on this. Out-Law News reports:

The High Court has protected the identities of seven individuals who made comments on a football website’s message board. Comments that are “strictly defamatory” can still be so trivial that they do not warrant an invasion of the authors’ privacy rights.

…[Judge Richard] Parkes said it was relevant “to consider whether the words complained of were, even if strictly defamatory, more than a trivial attack which would not be taken seriously.”

“I do not think it would be right to make an order for the disclosure of the identities of users who have posted messages which are barely defamatory or little more than abusive or likely to be understood as jokes,” he wrote. “That, it seems to me, would be disproportionate and unjustifiably intrusive.”

…Two [comments] were deemed “no more than saloon-bar moanings about the way in which the club is managed”. Another two “add to the mix a smidgeon of personal abuse of a kind which I would have thought most unlikely to be taken seriously.”

…Stefan Paciorek, a partner with Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind OUT-LAW.COM, said that the operator of this site did the right thing in letting the court decide whether he should reveal the names of these people or not.

Some other comments were deemed by the judge to be more serious, and so he has ordered that their authors’ details be disclosed. Interestingly, however, the claimants have not gone after the site’s operator himself, and according to the Resigster they have been obliged to pay him £9,000 to cover the costs of compliance. This is in contrast to the recent Mumsnet case, where the website owners agreed to pay childcare expert Gina Ford a five-figure sum over defamatory postings, including one that was obviously an absurd joke. This was an out-of-court settlement; the London Times noted that

Mumsnet had hoped to go to court, believing it to be a test case over freedom of speech on the internet, but felt it could not afford to risk losing.

In two other recent cases, claimants have gone on the offensive against website hosts rather than authors as a strategy to get websites pulled without having to face their critics in court. This is why Russian billionaire Alisher Uzmanov’s lawyers threatened Fasthosts rather than Craig Murray and Tim Ireland; it also appears to be why the Society of Homeopaths have targeted Netcetera rather than Dr Andy Lewis of Quackometer.

Judge Parkes’ judgement can be seen in full here.

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Back to Jerusalem, where Tony Blair faces an unlikely rival in his efforts to bring peace:

David Lynch, on a five-day visit to Israel to encourage transcendental meditation, met with Israeli President and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shimon Peres…”Real peace is not just the absence of war, but the absence of all suffering, all negativity,” Lynch said…”Change comes from within. From the first meditation, boom, you’re there.”

Peres showed he keeps up with the movies:

“Lynch is one of the greatest directors of our generation and a giant artist on his own, and it is a great honor for the state of Israel to host you and listen to you…”

Alas, Peres did not share with us his favourite Lynch film.

Lynch has been an enthusiast of TM for many years, and practitioners have been concerned with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for some time; the Jerusalem Post reported in 2002 that

A small number of meditators can stop terrorism in the Middle East, a leading US scientist told a Tel Aviv news conference yesterday.

“We have an important message for the people of the Middle East,” said Dr. John Hagelin, a quantum physicist and author, and recipient of the prestigious Kilby Award for scientific research.

“If the square root of 1 percent of the population regularly practice Transcendental Meditation (TM) techniques in a group, the wave effect of calm will eventually halt terrorism,” he claimed.

There is also apparently a small Natural Law Party of Israel, connected to the movement. A 2006 report notes how the TM practice of Yogic Flying was used to counter Hezbollah:

Reuven Zelinkovsky was a colonel in the Israeli army, but now he has renounced military might to join a squadron of yogic flyers at the Sea of Galilee to throw a “shield of invincibility” around the Jewish state.

…Here in Israel, according to a formula that says the square root of one percent of a country’s population is the number needed to tap into a collective consciousness robust enough to create a “shield of invincibility,” 265 people are needed.

But Zelinkovsky’s squadron, which includes architects, health workers and pensioners, many of whom are also teachers of TM, now numbers only about 20 after falling from a peak of 65 last week.

However, other New Religious Movements also feel they have something to offer the region: we’ve noted plans by Rev Moon to establish a peace centre in Galilee, and the promotion of a booklet by L. Ron Hubbard. And let’s not forget the famous plans of the Raelians to build an embassy in Jerusalem for the benefit of visiting extra-terrestrials.

(Hat tip: Cult News Network)

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News that George Bush has honoured the Dalai Lama with a Congressional Gold Medal leads me to revisit an early blog entry, from October 2004. That was when Pastor Mariano Yeo of the Shalom Alliance Fellowship in California suggested a link between the Dalai Lama’s visit to the University of Florida and the arrival of hurricanes:

Yeo believes the Dalai Lama is the world’s foremost proponent of idolatry. “Everywhere he goes disaster follows him,” Yeo observes. “The University of Miami conferred an honorary doctorate on him right before the hurricanes hit,” he notes. Yeo also correlated the unusual timing of earthquakes following Dalai Lama visits to India and Southern California.

We wait with bated breath…

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WorldNetDaily’s Aaron Klein has an update from Jerusalem, as plans are suggested for the division of the city:

WND had learned key Jerusalem neighborhoods mentions as slated for possible evacuation are owned by a U.S. Jewish group that over the years has allowed tens of thousands of Arabs to illegally squat on its land, resulting in the current Arab majority.

The US group is the Jewish National Fund, and under the subheading “‘Leftist millionaires’ influencing JNF?”, Klein tells us that

…Asked to explain why the esteemed Jewish organization would allow Arabs to illegally occupy strategic land purchased for Jews, one JNF source involved in land acquisition pointed to what he claimed was the “disproportionate influence” over the organization by a small group of Jewish multimillionaires in New Jersey who lead major public fundraising efforts for JNF…The Jews include the Wilf, Halpern, Zuckerman and Tisch families, according to the JNF source.

Funnily, WorldNetDaily had a rather different attitude when the Greek Orthodox Christian Patriarchate cancelled a deal with an Israeli settler group called Ateret Cohanim, which in 2005 plotted to lease church-owned land near the Jaffa Gate in a Palestinian part of Jerusalem. Despite the fact that fraud was apparently involved (the church’s financial officer is missing, reportedly in South America), when the church repudiated the arrangement Joseph Farah predictably editorialised that this was simply anti-Jewish racism, since Jews should be allowed to live anywhere in Jerusalem. Palestinians daring to live on Jewish-owned land, however, is another matter.

It’s also worth noting that while Klein is keen to name some American “Jewish millionaires”, he’s never felt the need to mention Ateret Cohanim’s bankroller, LA-based property developer and casino owner Irwin Moskowitz, perhaps because of Moskowitz’s reportedly rather sanguinary views. This is despite Klein having had cosy chats with Moskowitz’s son-in-law and man in Jerualem, Aryeh King.

(Klein’s distorted reporting is subject which I have chronicled on numerous occasions, most recently here; Terry Krepel at Conwebwatch has also produced several in-depth essays. I have also kept an eye on the Greek Orthodox leasing scandal, which still has numerous loose ends. See here)

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“Let our distinguished academics see how Orthodox people treat their pseudo-theories”

Interfax-Religion reports on the most bizarre anti-Darwinian protest yet, from the Union of the Orthodox Banner-Bearers and the Union of Orthodox Brotherhood in Russia. Apparently the pious members bought a toy monkey, which they then set upon:

The banner-bearers drove the stake in the monkey’s chest. As Leonid Simonovich-Nikshich, the head of the union, explained to onlookers, “it is exactly how satanic cults were punished in old times”.

Then the banner-bearers carried the monkey’s coffin on their shoulders behind Sts Cyril and Methodius’s monument, promising to bury it some place outside the city. “Let our distinguished academics see how Orthodox people treat their pseudo-theories”, Simonovich-Nikshich said.

This is only the silliest in a series of stunts by the Banner-Bearers: recently we’ve had a more predictable burning of a Harry Potter book (“It burns well”, Simonovich-Nikshich noted); last year a picture of Madonna got the Van Helsing treatment. Simonovich-Nikshich warned then that:

“We declare a new Holy Inquisition that will fight against the sacrilege of crosses, icons, Russian Orthodox symbols, including during Madonna’s show. The singer is an advocate of Kabbalah,”

However,

The main goal of the inquisition will be “to fight against slander, rather than to kill people,” he said.

An interesting academic article here by Stella Rock has some background:

The Union of Orthodox Banner-Bearers…was co-founded in 1993 by Leonid Simonovich…The contemporary Union of Banner-Bearers follows the Black Hundreds precedent of denying membership even to converted Jews…For Simonovich and the members of his Union, we are living in the Last Days, and politics is an irrelevance…America is castigated as a secular Satan, whose crime in bombing the Serbs is not her interference in the affairs of another state, but her decision to take up arms against an Orthodox country…Simonovich resurrected a more important fundamental – the Patristic declaration that a synagogue is a refuge of demons. Simonovich’s organisation also seeks to resurrect the medieval myth of Jewish ritual murder as evidence of the Jewish threat, publicly calling for the canonisation of Andriushy Iushchinsky, whom Jews were accused of murdering in 1911, and declaring that the murder of Tsar Paul I bore the hallmarks of a ‘Masonic’ ritual killing…Further threats to the integrity of Russian Orthodoxy are offered by Roman Catholics, NATO and the West…

Name variation: “Union of Orthodox Gonfalon-Bearers”

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“I wanted to write and edit a book, a research on the problem of homosexuality in the clergy…it was merely an experiment”

Monsignor Tommaso Stenico, recently:

I am fascinated by the Magisterium of Benedict XVI…[The church] has not been wrong in opposing civilian legislation which undermines ethics and morals in a catastrophic way.*

What “civilian legislation” would that be? Stenico does not say, but this quote from the Pope obviously springs to mind:

Benedict stressed that marriage between man and woman was the cornerstone of society and not some “casual sociological construction” that could be replaced.

“It’s a serious error to obscure the value and function of the legitimate family founded on matrimony, attributing to other forms of unions improper legal recognition, for which there really is no social need,” he said.

Monsignor Tommaso Stenico, a few days ago:

The Vatican said Saturday it has suspended a monsignor from a senior post at the Holy See after an Italian TV program using a hidden camera recorded him making advances to a young man and asserting that gay sex was not sinful.

The Vatican did not identify the monsignor by name. But Monsignor Tommaso Stenico confirmed in a telephone interview with The Associated Press that he had been suspended from his post at the Vatican’s Congregation for Clergy, an office which aims to ensure proper conduct by priests.

…The man La Repubblica identified as the Vatican official can be heard saying that “he didn’t feel he was sinning” by having sex with gay men and asking his visitor if he liked him.

However, Stenico has since come up with an interesting explanation:

I’m OK. I wanted to write and edit a book, a research on the problem of homosexuality in the clergy. Because today the devil is inside the Church and the Pope is left alone. So I used the Internet and looked for gay sites. I contacted that boy and he came to see me. It would have been last July, I don’t recall exactly, but it was not a Sunday. The point is the TV channel had earned my good faith…but in substance, it was merely an experiment, a study on the subject … and I fell into a trap. I will explain all to my superiors.*

I’m sure Ted Haggard wishes he had thought of that one. No word from Mike Jones so far.

Stenico has a website, which is currently down. Details about Stenico in English are hard to come by, but he has apparently edited two volumes of Pope Benedict’s discourses. He is also a trained psychoanalyst.

*Taken from translations that have appeared on the Papa Ratzinger Forum derived from PETRUS. Italian originals here (cached version only available) and here.

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Filmed extremists “stretched the limits, but it was hyped”

Abu Usamah “the last buffer” for radicalised Muslims

The BBC’s Newsnight has an interesting follow-up on Undercover Mosque, the Channel 4 documentary about Islamic extremism at a prominent Birmingham mosque and some other locations. The West Midlands Police spent thousands of pounds reviewing unused footage from the documentary, at first to see if any of those featured the programme had committed any offences. As I blogged at the time, one speaker was shown making joking pig-snorting noises as he suggested all Jews should be killed, while Saudi-trained Abu Usamah was seen telling listeners that:

…No one loves the kuffaar! Not a single person here from the Muslims loves the kuffaar. Whether those kuffaar are from the UK or from the US. We love the people of Islam and we hate the people of kuffaar. We hate the kuffaar!

Newsnight highlights some other footage of Abu Usamah, in which he opines that although he disagrees with the “methodology” of Osama bin Laden, he is worth “a million George Bushes” because he is a Muslim, and that non-Muslims are “pathological liars”.

However, the police decided that there was insufficient evidence to act, and instead decided to investigate whether the programme was “distorted”. The result was that the police force asked the Crown Prosecution Service to consider prosecuting the programme-makers for stirring-up racial hatred under the 1986 Public Order Act; CPS lawyer Bethan David advised them that this would have no chance of success, and instead suggested that they should complain to Ofcom, the UK television regulator.

The police complaint to Ofcom was unprecedented, and according to barrister Sarah Palin it was an act which went beyond police’s remit (Palin co-represented the BBC at the Hutton enquiry, alongside the QC who successfully represented journalist Donal MacIntyre in his libel case against Kent Police. She has also acted in a number of libel cases, and has written an article against the secrecy surrounding family courts). In the opinion of Newsnight, which reviewed transcripts of the unseen footage, the programme “wasn’t distorted”.

Newsnight journalist Peter Marshall explains why the complaint was made, revealing a political context:

Sources in the West Midlands force told me, “What some speakers said in that film stretched the limits, but it was hyped. If that’s all Channel 4 got in months filming undercover, it wasn’t very good.”

They also said the police are keen to maintain good relations with the mosque, and with characters like Abu Usamah, because they’re against terrorism.

The sources describe them as “the last buffer before radicalised people fall off into the abyss. It’s not so much the police wanting to keep in with them, as with keep talking and understanding”.

Maintaining “good relations” apparently includes trying to intimidate critical investigative journalists with legal threats and making complaints about the quality of TV programmes.

It’s good to see BBC Newsnight looking closely at a Channel 4 documentary on Islamism, since they could learn a thing or two: last year Newsnight conducted an exposé of the radical Islamist group Hizb ut Tahrir, relying heavily on material derived from VIGIL, a private and shadowy investigative group. Alas, it was later shown that VIGIL and those associated with it have a rather weird agenda of their own.

(Hat-tip: MediaWatchWatch)

Name variation: Abu Usama

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Nazareth-based website Come and See has a collection of photographs and a You Tube link chronicling the funeral of Rami Ayyad, the 30-year-old Palestinian Christian activist who was murdered – almost certainly by Islamists – at the weekend in Gaza. Ayyad worked for Gaza’s Bible Society bookshop, which was bombed back in April. The shop opened in 1999, and according to a 2000 Bible Society report, it was a welcome presence:

The Bible Society Bookshop which opened here almost a year ago has been warmly welcomed by the people of Gaza, reports the Bible Society in the West Bank (BSWB).

…Almost as soon as it opened, the bookshop received an invitation from the Ministry of Culture to take part in book exhibitions in Gaza and Ramallah and to be part of the Palestinian section at other bookfairs in the Arab world.

…the people of Gaza feel that they have been forgotten by the outside world. But many local Christians feel that the opening of the Bible Society bookshop marks a turning point for Gaza. George, a member of the Baptist church in Gaza City, describes the bookshop as a “testament of love to our people.”

A report by Arieh Cohen at Asia News has details of reactions to the killing:

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, immediately issued a statement calling the killing “a desperate attempt to sabotage the good social relations in Palestinian society and the friendly relations between Christian and Muslims”.

Hamas authorities, who manage security in Gaza, have promised to punish “without pity” the authors of the crime who, “compromise the security and stability of our people”.

In Gaza there are around 3,200 Christians – Greek Orthodox, Catholic and protestant – compared to a Muslim population of circa 1.5 million. Relations between the two communities, by and large are calm, united by the same ethnic roots. The rising Islamic fundamentalism in Gaza and in the Palestinian world is however creating increasing incidents between the two. During the Hamas takeover, vandals ransacked a Catholic convent and an adjacent Rosary Sisters school, breakingcrosses and smashing the face of a ceramic Jesus. No one claimed responsibility, and Hamas vehemently denied involvement.

Back in June, Christian Today carried a report that was cautiously hopeful about the future of Christians under Hamas:

Open Doors, an international ministry working with persecuted Christian, said although it fears a worsening of living conditions for Gaza inhabitants, it does not think Christians will be attacked by the Islamic fundamentalist group.

…However, Janssen noted that he hopes the conversations between Hamas leaders and Open Doors founder Brother Andrew “will bear some fruit.”

Brother Andrew had built a relationship spanning over a decade with Hamas leaders. In December 1992, over a thousand Hamas leaders were deported from Israel and left on the side of a mountain in Lebanon. Brother Andrew had flew in and visited the Hamas camp in a humanitarian way and gave Bibles and his book “God’s Smuggler” to them, who in turn invited Brother Andrew into their tent for a meal.

This was all very well – but given that Brother Andrew also hopes to convert the militants, one wonders how effective his advocacy for Palestinian Christians could be (I blogged on Open Doors just a few days ago). In August, things were looking more dodgy, when Sana al-Sayegh, a Christian woman academic, converted to Islam. Fatah alleged that she had been forcibly converted after being kidnapped, and the murky business has never been resolved. The conservative Cybercast News Service noted that:

According to a report in Middle East Newsline last week, Hamas is moving fast against non-Muslims in the area. Fatah officials who spoke to the news service on condition of anonymity said Hamas is pressing leaders of the 2,000-member Christian community to either convert to Islam or emigrate.

(I wasn’t able to track down the Middle East Newsline report to confirm this)

However, Fatah’s complaint against Hamas might carry more weight if it wasn’t trying to outdo the Islamists with a new Morality Police enforcing compliance with Ramadan.

**

Meanwhile, the murder of Ayyad is also an occasion for ghoulish point-scoring by certain supporters of Israel who couldn’t have given a toss about Gazan Christians when they were living under direct Israeli occupation. Step forward, Melanie Phillips:

…the Islamist religious terror being perpetrated in Gaza is also going virtually unremarked by the British media. I don’t recall reading this in the mainstream press:

Phillips goes on to quote a short report which cites an AP report on the tragedy. The AP report can be seen on various sites, including that of…The Guardian. But this kind of willful distortion of the facts is Phillips’ stock-in-trade – another example was noted at Pickled Politics yesterday. I find it very difficult to see how anyone who values good sense or intellectual integrity would take her seriously.

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The website of Craig Murray – which was pulled after an Uzbek-Russian billionaire paid a firm of lawyers to write a nasty letter to his webhost – is back online.

Meanwhile, Oliver Kamm has promised to give us new details on his legal spat with Neil Clark, a rival blogger and journalist who issued a writ against against him after he pointed out some deficiencies in Clark’s work. Says Kamm:

I merely record how I have gone about defending myself – and, not to overstate the case, the principles of free speech and fair comment on matters of public interest – against admittedly unintimidating and worthless threats of legal action, in the hope that the account may prove interesting to other bloggers. Libel threats against bloggers are highly likely to be an issue that will arise in some other, less farcical, form in future.

Indeed.

I disagree with Kamm’s positions on a number of subjects, but his method of arguing is a model of careful reasoning and close attention to detail, and one occasionally gets introduced to a new word. He is also someone who understands the seriousness of what is at stake when legal threats are used to suppress free speech, and he is willing to take a stand.

Incidentally, Neil Clark is not the only British blogger to have attempted to silence a fellow writer through threatening legal action: another example is Paul Staines, who blogs as “Guido Fawkes“. Staines threatened an action against blogger Sunny Hundal after Hundal quoted an old newspaper report about him found on Lexis-Nexis; the story can be read here. Staines, it is worth noting, is a member of the supposedly “libertarian Right”.

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