Bartholomew's Notes

God backs Richard Roberts on financial mismanagement allegation; John Hagee to investigate

Left Behind Games (and others), take note: Richard Roberts, son of legendary evangelist Oral Roberts, has just received a message from the Almighty, which he passed on at a recent campus chapel service:

“We live in a litigious society. Anyone can get mad and file a lawsuit against another person whether they have a legitimate case or not.”

Well, we all know that – but God was apparently moved to remind Roberts of the fact because he (Roberts) is facing a lawsuit over alleged financial abuses:

Richard Roberts is accused of illegal involvement in a local political campaign and lavish spending at donors’ expense, including numerous home remodeling projects, use of the university jet for his daughter’s senior trip to the Bahamas, and a red Mercedes convertible and a Lexus SUV for his wife, Lindsay.

One allegation is particularly weird:

Mrs. Roberts – who is a member of the board of regents and is referred to as ORU’s “first lady” on the university’s Web site – frequently had cell-phone bills of more than $800 per month, with hundreds of text messages sent between 1 a.m. to 3 a.m. to “underage males who had been provided phones at university expense.”

The claims came to light after a confidential internal report prepared by Richard Roberts’s sister-in-law was found by a student and passed to a professor. A group of professors then handed the document to the board of regents, and they complain they were consequently dismissed. According to God, though, as revealed to Roberts:

“This lawsuit…is about intimidation, blackmail and extortion”.

The AP also tells us that

San Antonio televangelist John Hagee, a member of the ORU board of regents, said the university’s executive board “is conducting a full and thorough investigation.”

Well, I wouldn’t hold my breath there – Hagee has himself been a target for criticisms over his very generous remuneration.  The San Antonio Express-News reported in 2003:

According to income tax statements that GETV [Global Evangelism Television] filed with the Internal Revenue Service, the nonprofit organization drew $18.3 million in revenue in 2001, the most recent year the organization submitted a return to the IRS. That year, Hagee’s total compensation package amounted to more than $1.25 million.

“I’m amazed at the income,” said Pamela Smith, an accounting professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio…Smith said she wasn’t aware of any nonprofit director in San Antonio who earned more than Hagee.

Critics complained that because Hagee family members were appointed as ministry officers, there was a “conflict of interest”, since  they could all “determine their own salaries, benefits and other forms of compensation.” Another conflict was that Hagee enjoyed royalty payments on products promoted through the donation-funded GETV – a practice specifically forbidden by the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability.

(Hat tip: Pharyngula)

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Just a few weeks after a New York businessman decided to withdraw a libel suit against PZ Myers for calling him a “crackpot” in a book review, someone else is turning to legal threats to squash critical comment.

This time it’s a company, Left Behind Games. Left Behind, of course, was a series of apocalyptic novels written by conservative evangelicals Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, in which the anti-Christ becomes Secretary General of the United Nations and inaugurates a one-world government before his forces are massacred by Jesus at the Second Coming. Tens of millions of copies have been sold.

Left Behind Games was established to create a series of Christian video games based on the books, but the results have not been well-received: there have been complaints from Christians and non-Christians that the game is violent and promotes a paranoid world-view; gamers generally found the game uninteresting. LBG, seeing its share-price tumble, tried a PR counter-attack: it was pointed out that players lose points when they shoot the enemy; according to former CEO Jeff Frichner:

…”You can win the game by not firing a shot, but by conducting spiritual warfare. There’s a prayer button (and) a worship button…”

A consultant brought in to market the game to Asia praised it as “non-violent”, which is odd; as I noted at the time, Jerry Jenkins and Frichner argue that the game’s violence should be put in a Biblical context, while LaHaye has complained that it is no more violent than other games.

However, LBG has now taken off the gloves; a poster to Daily Kos has the latest:

Gordon D. Katz, an attorney for [CEO Troy] Lyndon’s company, has recently sent letters – some via certified mail, and others via his Gmail account — to blogs large and small which have either criticized the game, or linked to news reports on the [alleged – RB] eliminationist theology of the game, or even feature critiques, satirical statements, or harshly worded opinions from blog readers. Radical Congruency received two identical, saber-rattling letters.

Here’s an extract:

…Unfortunately, there are many statements on your website which appear to be false and misleading. This type of misinformation may cause significant and irreparable harm to Left Behind Video Games Inc. and must be removed…If you do not comply immediately, the company will be forced to pursue additional legal action which will include claims for damages, costs of suit and attorney’s fees. This may subject you and your organization to significant legal and financial damages.

By failing to make clear what exactly is being objected to, the letter fails as a serious legal document. Doubtless the hope is that fearful bloggers will simply self-censor anything that might be negative. But who is Gordon D. Katz? The Daily Kos poster did some digging, and found out that the office is actually a private house belonging to Katz’s mother, and that his named “Administrator” is none other than Lyndon’s wife. Most curious.

Criticisms of the game are not confined to blogs – newspapers and magazines have covered the controversy, and it is even referenced in Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion. Since Dawkins is published in the UK, perhaps LBG could get tips on using UK libel law from Sheik Khalid bin Mahfouz or Alisher Usmanov.

UPDATE: Gamer sites are unimpressed.

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Scott Lively and his Latvian neo-Pentecostal links highlighted

A few days ago on I blogged on the anti-gay activism of Oregon-based Scott Lively and his links with the international neo-Pentecostal New Generation church in Latvia. Looks as though I just skimmed the surface; Casey Sanchez of the Southern Poverty Law Center has the full story:

On the first day of July, Satender Singh was gay-bashed to death. The 26-year-old Fijian of Indian descent was enjoying a holiday weekend outing at Lake Natoma with three married Indian couples around his age. Singh was delicate and dateless — two facts that did not go unnoticed by a party of Russian-speaking immigrants two picnic tables away.

According to multiple witnesses, the men began loudly harassing Singh and his friends, calling them “7-Eleven workers” and “Sodomites.” The Slavic men bragged about belonging to a Russian evangelical church and told Singh that he should go to a “good church” like theirs…”

Singh was killed by a blow to the head. Also:

…Sacramento gay and lesbian rights advocate Wendy Hill, 33, said that when she came of age as a lesbian in the mid-1990s, Sacramento was a safer place. “As a college student, you pushed the envelope. You walked down the street hand-in-hand with another girl, even if you weren’t dating.” Now, Hill says, after a group of rowdy Russian-speaking protesters showed up outside her house one morning, “I get afraid of that now, walking hand in hand with my wife.”

Funnily enough, such details were absent from the recent report about Lively at Latvia which appeared in OneNewsNow, which notes only – with tacit approval – that according to Lively

…people of the former Soviet Union’s Russian-speaking countries are among the strongest opponents of the homosexual agenda in the world.

Sanchez gives us a lot more background detail:

…Vlad Kusakin, the host of a Russian-language anti-gay radio show in Sacramento and the publisher of a Russian-language newspaper in Seattle, told The Seattle Times in January that God has “made an injection” of high numbers of anti-gay Slavic evangelicals into traditionally liberal West Coast cities. “In those places where the disease is progressing, God made a divine penicillin,” Kusakin said…anti-gay talk radio hosts and fundamentalist preachers routinely deliver hateful screeds on the airwaves and from the pulpit in their native tongue that, were they delivered in English, would be a source of nationwide controversy.

As for Lively:

Lively identifies “the enemy” as not only homosexuals, but also what he terms “homosexualists,” a category that includes anyone, regardless of sexual orientation, who “actively promotes homosexuality as morally and socially equivalent to heterosexuality as a basis for social policy.”

When he personally confronts the enemy, Lively practices what he preaches when it comes to “battle-hardened” tactics. He recently was ordered by a civil court judge to pay $20,000 to lesbian photojournalist Catherine Stauffer for dragging her by the hair through the halls of a Portland church in 1991.

Apparently, Lively owes his reputation among Slav fundamentalists to a Russian translation of his pseudo-historical book The Pink Swastika, which argues that Hitler and the Nazis were gay; the book has been discredited, and “Even right-wing legislators in the California Assembly are said to audibly groan when Slavic evangelicals wave a copy of the pink volume during testimony.” Meanwhile, in Latvia:

…In a speech given after Riga’s first gay pride parade in 2005, Ledyaev told his international congregation: “Homosexuality is a…dangerous and contagious disease. The contagious should be isolated and treated. Otherwise, an epidemic will sweep through the entire community.”

The parade had been opposed by right-wing protestors who threw bags of faeces; among them were youths in “I Love New Generation” T-shirts. Further:

…The mayor of Riga at the time was Janic Smits, a close friend of Pastor Ledyaev and a prominent member of his New Generation Church. During a parliamentary debate on whether sexual orientation should be covered under a national ban on discrimination, Smits quoted the Old Testament: “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.” Last year, Smits was elevated to chair the Latvian Parliament’s Human Rights Commission.

That last point is not surprising; current Eastern European anti-gay rhetoric makes use of human rights discourse – meaning the right of the religious not to have to accept gay rights. That was the line taken by Orthodox Patriarch Alexei II during his recent address to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) in Strasbourg:

“When persistent attempts were made to hold a homosexual parade in Moscow, we believed that that meant propaganda and advertisement of sin,” Alexy told a session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) in Strasbourg, France.

Attempts are made to justify homosexuality by calling it a disease, the patriarch said. Yet kleptomania can also be considered a disease, he argued. “Why then no one advertises kleptomania while homosexuality gets advertised via gay parades?” he said…

“…nobody must try to force me or my brothers and sisters in faith to be silent and [to prevent us from] using the word sin for something that is called sin in God’s Word,” the patriarch said.

It is the right of religious believers to question the acceptability of legal and political support for a feature of society, he said.

Read the whole of the SPLC report.

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From the Banjul Point:

A four-member delegation from Universal Peace Federation (UPF) recently paid a visit to The Gambia as part of efforts to introduce the federation to the country.

The delegation, which arrived in The Gambia on 31 August and led to The Point offices by Mr. Ebrima Jadama of Family Federation for World Peace, include Kue Youl-Lee, Mina Takakusaki, Louice Miyake and Nana Toril.

According to Mr. Jadama, UPF is a global alliance of individuals and organizations dedicated to building a world of peace, adding that the federation was founded in 2005 by Rev. Dr. Sun Myung Moon, a South Korean domiciling in the U.S.

Details about the members of delegation are virtually non-existent on-line, although a Taiwanese site belonging to the Unification Church refers to Jadama as a “Gambian Church leader”; in all likelihood this means a Christian church. This is significant; Ed Brayton has recently given us an overview of Rev Moon’s association with church leaders in Michigan, while I have been keeping an eye on the activities of former Roman Catholic archbishop Emmanuel Milingo. Milingo, who has been excommunicated by the church, endorses Moon’s mission and is attempting to recruit disaffected Roman Catholic clergy who wish to marry.

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“All of the Buddhist countries have to participate”

The BBC World Service interviews Win Naing of the Burmese National League for Democracy, who has a rather alarming message:

As far as I know we are going into the religious war because the soldiers posted in Rangoon they are non-Buddhist soldiers. They have crashed down the monasteries, they have beaten up the [unclear*], the monks, and even the [unclear*], unarmed civilians. They even decapitated our Buddhist statue. This is just the most critical, the most evil thing that happened in our country since our history…We are going into a religious war. All of the Buddhist countries have to participate this event.

By “non-Buddhist” soldiers, one assumes he means “impious” soldiers, rather than adherents of some other religion. But will a Buddhist call to arms – or, at least, to “participate” – be heeded? The Bangkok Nation suggests not:

A careful study of comments and statements by senior officials including Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont, General Sonthi Boonyaratglin, the chairman for the Council For National Security, and Foreign Minister Nitya Pibulsonggram shows a complete lack of moral courage and appreciation of the democratic struggle there. While the international community has expressed outrage and applied pressure, Thais are behaving as if they were similar to or a part of the Burmese junta.

In response to a question on the Burmese situation posed at a luncheon talk at the Asia Society in New York on Wednesday, Surayud said with a deadpan face that as the head of a Buddhist nation, he urged the Burmese junta not to use force as this was not the Buddhist way.

…Somehow, Rangoon has effectively blackmailed Bangkok for its energy needs. Through inept attitudes and policies, the Thais have failed to respond to Burmese people’s request for basic rights and freedoms…The future is bleak for Thailand to reclaim its place as a leading democratic voice in the region and regain its international credentials.

(NB – Win Naing is a London-based dissident; he is not the same person as U Win Naing, the pro-democracy politician who is currently under arrest in Burma)

*The unclear word, repeated twice, is something like “gandou” – any explanation appreciated.

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A few weeks ago I blogged on Fort Lauderdale mayor Jim Naugle’s religious ally the Koinonia Worship Center, members of which shared a stage with him while dressed in military fatigues:

Spaulding notes that Koinonia has a web presence on My Space. An audio message there uses a lot of the “spiritual warfare” language typical of the conservative Christian “men’s movement” (see this essay by Jeff Sharlet for an overview), but aimed specifically at African-Americans (there are a number of US churches that cater to the needs of black Americans; Barack Obama is associated with one, to the outrage of conservatives).

This paragraph has brought down the wrath of “Christian educator” and Townhall blogger Collin B:

Spiritual warfare metaphors have been around about two millennia now. Maybe he will read his Bible. Someday.

Actually, I was plodding through Ezekiel just a few weeks ago – and not only do I read the Bible, I have an audio version on my mp3 player (and read by an American evangelical, as it happens). So why does Mr B think I was unaware of the basis for “spiritual warfare” rhetoric? Apparently because I noted that it was an identifying feature of this particular group – which explains the military fatigues. How that suggests Biblical illiteracy on my part is beyond me; perhaps my analysis was too subtle, and I have been casting pearls before swine. Moving on:

…He says that the criticism of Obama is about being a part of a church that ministers to blacks. NO. The complaint, the basis for it, about Obama is that, several years ago, he make calculated statements that Dems needed to make use of churches as campaign tools. He is a user.

Actually, YES. The righteous Mr B apparently (and this the most charitable explanation) didn’t bother to follow the link I provided. Here’s Tucker Carlson, whose attack was representative:

So Barack Obama is a member of a church called Trinity United Church of Christ. It’s a predominantly black church in Chicago, that espouses something called the “Black Value System,” which includes calls for congregants to be “soldiers for black freedom” and a, quote, “disavowal of the pursuit of middleclassness.” Now, it would seem to me, Tom, not to make a broad sweeping statement here, but a racially exclusive theology, a theology that ministers to one group of people, based on race, kind of contradicts the basic tenets of Christianity, and is worth talking about. Wouldn’t you say?

My point was that while this church was the focus of conservative outrage, there are plenty of other churches, such as Koinoina, which also focus on black Americans and their particular socio-economic circumstances. The reason I made the aside was because this shows the ignorance and opportunism of those who attacked Obama through his church [UPDATE 2008: please note I wrote this before Wirght’s more disreputable statements and associations came to light] . As to whether Obama is “a user” of evangelicals or not, I have no idea – although I would suggest that a fair few Republican politicians are.

My nemesis continues:

He says that African-Americans are the target of this Florida ministry. He’s right. So why is that wrong in his mind? So how is this racist?

When I research a topic, I usually figure that my readers are intelligent enough to draw their own conclusions without superfluous commentary from me. Being human, I sometimes can’t resist adding a bit of opinion, but I am under no illusions that anyone comes here because they want to know what I think about things. However, this does sometimes mean dimmer readers will simply make wild assumptions about why I’m noting something. Of course, I nowhere suggested, or even hinted, that Koinoina was racist, and I don’t believe that it is. I mentioned its particular emphasis on African-Americans because that gives a fuller picture.

He’s not done yet, though:

We’re not allowed to stand against the politics of the homosexual activists and the deconstruction of “family.” Those are “liberal” activities. We’re not allowed to go public — just keep it all within the four walls.

Again, nowhere did I suggest that Koinoina’s activities ought to be curtailed. What Mr B means is that criticism of particular evangelical activities amounts to attempts at religious suppression. This probably works for his target audience at Townhall, but for this rest of us it’s just foolish. As for Koinoina’s appearance with Jim Naugle, I’ll leave it to the church’s congregation and the mayor’s electorate to decide whether the stunt reflects well on either of them.

Though the creation of an evangelical enemy, Mr. Bartholomew has set up the evangelical vs. black and evangelical vs. homosexual conflicts… evangelicals are to him bad Americans.

Doubtless, Mr B draws this inference because another version of my post also appeared on the website Talk to Action, which critiques and brings to public attention many of the activities and positions of the religious right. So, just in case there is any genuine doubt: I do not hate evangelicals (although please don’t ask me to endure very much “Praise and Worship” music). I believe that evangelicalism is fascinating, but that despite being one of the most significant religious trends out there, its global significance has been largely overlooked. One of the purposes of this blog is to try and redress that, by highlighting particular developments and alliances within the movement. Some aspects of current evangelicalism are positive, but others I think are harmful – hence my association with Talk to Action. That does not mean, though, that the investigations of a critical outsider are motivated by bad faith or malice, which appears to be the inference here.

Mr B concludes:

The use of Ephesians 6 is apparently not to be allowed in a pluralistic society. It might offend the Marxists.

Apparently in some circles in America you can still cry “Communist!” when faced with critics and get taken seriously. But again for the record, I prefer Max Weber over Marx. And Mr B is free to use Ephesians 6 as an inspiration for his involvement in public affairs if he so wishes.

Finally, I don’t believe that Mr B indulges in gross misrepresentation and absurd hyperbole because he is an evangelical. The things I find negative in evangelicalism derive from attitudes of mind which one can find in any movement – religious or secular, left or right. Mr B would doubtless be a silly and counter-productive advocate for whichever cause he decided to associate himself with.

UPDATE: Mr B responds. Briefly, he believes that I lack intellectual integrity because I “engage in petty name-calling rather than discuss[ing] the subject dispassionately”. On the other hand, it is quite OK for him to describe my “representative views” as being “Marxist”, but it is dishonest of me to have accused him of using the “Communist” label against people he disagrees with. He also complains that I identify evangelicalism with the religious right; actually, I do try to keep in mind the distinction, but I also think it’s obvious that there’s a considerable overlap.

Further, he is perplexed as to why I called him a Townhall blogger, although he thinks it must be a “slure” [sic]. In fact, anyone can set up a Townhall blog, in the same way as my blog was established when Salon offered the same service – and consequently I’m also sometimes mistaken for someone either paid or endorsed by Salon. One difference, though, is that Mr B’s blog carries a large by-line which states “A Blog of Townhall.com“.

Readers can judge for themselves how adequately this refutes my posting above. It remains only for me to wish those under Mr B’s instruction as a “Christian educator” the best of luck; they will certainly need it.

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From OneNewsNow:

An international pro-family organization, Watchmen on the Walls (WOW), has announced its participation in the boycott of Ford Motor Company.

The announcement comes 18 months into the boycott that began in the United States, and WOW says it will now help spread it to Russian-speaking countries near its headquarters in Latvia.

…[S]pokesman Dr. Scott Lively…says people of the former Soviet Union’s Russian-speaking countries are among the strongest opponents of the homosexual agenda in the world.

Ford is known for being nice to gay employees and for aiming advertising at a gay clientele; this has brought down the wrath of the American Family Association, which runs OneNewsNow. Of course, Lively is quite right about that last statement, given that gay Russians face violent assaults from citizens whipped up by far-right nationalists and Orthodox fundamentalists. And Lively is apparently happy to inflame the situation further; Gay Republic Daily quotes a speech he made during a trip to Russia earlier this month:

“The youth must know about “the blue threat” as much as possible. Many countries of the former Soviet Union, which had been the outposts of family values recently, have submitted to the pressure of homosexuals.”

“A gay parade has already been held in Lithuania, and in Kiev Ukrainian President was standing on one stage with George Michael, a homosexual singer, who has been caught making love in the bushes recently. Even in Russia in the town of Omsk homosexuals penetrated into a local university and formed their own club, which tried to breakdown my lecture. But I believe that Russia will become a country, where “the blue plague” will be stopped.”

Lively is most famous for his 1995 book The Pink Swastika, which explored the presence of homosexuality in the Nazi Party. The book argues that gay activists can be compared with the Brownshirts, and that the claim that homosexuals were the victims of Nazism is a historical distortion on a par with Holocaust denial. He also helps to run the Oregan Citizen’s Alliance, which was dormant before Lively hit on the idea of involving East European immigrants. The Williamette Week reported in February:

In front of about 30 people gathered recently in a Salem church sanctuary to celebrate the reunion of the Oregon Citizens Alliance, Scott Lively found cause for optimism about the rebirth of the anti-gay group.

…Lively, a longtime OCA leader, introduced five members from the group the Watchmen on the Walls—an international network of Christian activists dedicated to fighting what it calls “the homosexual agenda”—to show a video of their movement in parts of the former Soviet Union.

The 45-minute video, which repeatedly refers to homosexuals as “terrorists,” shows how conservative Latvians successfully stopped gays from marching in their capital, Riga. (European news reports show anti-gay demonstrators throwing feces on the gays.)

The video also features Alexei Ledyaev—a Kazakhstan-born Baptist pastor and leader of the New Generation Church, whose satellite broadcasts claim an audience of more than 200 million people—leading large crowds in chants of “In the name of Jesus Christ, we curse the name of homosexuality!”

Ledyaev is Lively’s link-man in Latvia; the Baltic Times published a profile last summer which also recounted details of the anti-gay counter-protest:

Many of those who witnessed the events of that afternoon recall four hours of a tense confrontation between an irate crowd shouting things like “No to sodomy!” and a line of stoical, generally non-responsive policemen, punctuated by sudden moments of banal violence. One protester pelted an LNT cameraman with eggs. When a member of Mozaika [a gay-rights group] attempted to leave the hotel by the front door, one protester ran up to squirt water in her face.

Igors Maslakovs directed the members of his group, No Pride, to go to other exits of the hotel in order to harass gay pride participants as they were leaving, and many of the children, some as young as eight, under his stead, all dressed in particularly graphic T-shirts that suggested a ban on sodomy, jumped up to follow orders, as if they were playing a game of “capture the flag.”

A rambling and poorly-translated essay by Ledyaev reposted here gives his side, and some analysis:

A double policemen cordon around the few mostly foreign homosexuals (at least two policemen per each gay) beating their ownin order to make a way for foreigners this was too much!

A friend of mine grabbed a policeman by his truncheon and asked him,

* Why do you beat the people?
* We were given an order that none of the gay should be hurt.
* And if they tell you to fire at people?
* You should inquire the city council of Riga, said the policeman and pulled out his tool of mass impact.

Security of the gay was more important than security of the people…

Stay home, dear Swedish pederasts, and walk down the streets of your own Stockholm but don’t show up on the squares of Riga.

…Islamization goes full speed wherever homosexual lifestyle is legally accepted. Muslim organizations and committees, centers and mosques, schools are being opened overwhelmingly everywhere…. Homosexuality and islamization are two sides of the medal and integral elements of the one destructive process of European culture and civilization.

Latvia-based blog Marginalia has some further commentary:

The antics of New Generation, a mostly Russophone sect closely tied to Ainars Slesers’ Latvia’s First Party (LPP), have long been reported in Latvia — I’m choosing to describe it as “a mostly Russophone sect” on purpose, because that’s what it is (Ledyaev, its leader and a self-described “apostle,” was furious when our President described it that way)… Ledyaev has suggested replacing Latvia’s constitution, the Satversme, with the Ten Commandments, introducing Christian totalitarianism, and “humbling all liberals and homosexuals.”

Ledyaev was also the subject of a satirical cartoon that showed him as a worshipper of Cthulhu; the newspaper office found itself surrounded by protesters.

In 2002, Ledyaev was barred from Russia, where, according to Charisma, his denomination has sixty branches (there are also plans to expand into Africa). He believes that George Bush “is a man chosen to fulfill God’s plan on earth in the last days”, and that there will be a “New World Order” of Christianity.

Lively visited Latvia in March, alongside a fellow activist named Ken Hutcherson. Hutcherson presented himself as coming from the White House as “Special Envoy for Adoptions, Family Values, Religious Freedom, and Medical Relief”. According to the Seattle Stranger, Hutcherson claims he was given this title by the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, although a White House spokeswoman denied it was true.

UPDATE: The SPLC has a report on all this. See my blog entry here.

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A commentator to Ed Brayton’s Dispatches from the Culture Wars draws attention to the following notice on the website of the Family Research Council, a US religious right organisation run by Tony Perkins (link added):

In an article in The Nation (“Justice Sunday Preachers” April 26, 2005), Max Blumenthal falsely asserts, “In 1996 [Tony] Perkins paid former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke $82,500 for his mailing list. At the time, Perkins was the campaign manager for a right-wing Republican candidate for the US Senate in Louisiana.”

Tony Perkins was the manager of the 1996 U.S. Senate campaign of Republican Woody Jenkins in Louisiana where Impact Media was contracted to make pre-recorded telephone calls for the campaign. In 1999, an unrelated federal investigation uncovered that David Duke had a financial interest in the company, which he did not report to the IRS, resulting in his conviction on federal tax evasion charges. This connection was not known to Mr. Perkins until 1999.

A second commentator draws attention to this 2002 legal document  – a settlement agreement – on the website of the Federal Election Commission:

…After the 1996 primary election in Louisiana, David Duke contacted Woody Jenkins and recommended that he use the services of a computerized phone bank system run by Impact Mail. Jenkins purchased several rounds of calls from Impact Mail. After the first round of calls, Jenkins began hearing complaints that Duke’s name would appear on the caller ID when a phone bank message would arrive. At that point, Jenkins tried to cancel the transaction but was unable to because Tony Perkins, his campaign manager, had signed a contract with Impact Mail. Subsequently, Jenkins instructed Perkins to put a stop payment on the check issued to Impact Mail and directed that Impact Mail be paid through Courtney Communications, the campaign’s media firm…

For this attempt to hide the connection with Duke, Jenkins’ campaign got off very lightly with a civil penalty of $3000. These rather pertinent facts do not appear in the FRC’s statement.

All of this is of interest to Ed because Perkins was also the founder of the Louisiana Family Forum, which has just received a grant of $100,000 in taxpayers’ money in order to promote Creationism. This is thanks to the efforts Senator David Vitter, who has been desparate to improve his conservative credentials since he admitted to making use of prostitutes; the LFF’s Gene Mills helpfully jumped to Vitter’s defence by noting that Vitter has “repented of the allegations” – a rather uncharacteristically euphemistic way of referring to “sins”.

I looked at Mills and the LFF a couple of years ago, when a sub-group, the Pastor’s Resource Council (sic for apostrophe) set up PRC Compassion to dispense aid post-Katrina. See here and here.

UPDATE: Ed has a follow-up post:

…Joe Carter tells me that Perkins…says that Woody Jenkins has confirmed that he never told Perkins that Impact Mail was Duke’s company when he instructed him to sign the contract with them…We can certainly reason that Perkins found out about Duke’s involvement, at the very least, at the time that the cover up began. It stretches credulity considerably to believe that 1) he didn’t know about the complaints that Duke’s name was showing up on the caller IDs once the calls began; or 2) he didn’t bother to ask Jenkins why he was to launder the payments for Duke’s company through another company.

So it seems all but certain that even if Perkins did not know that they were using Duke’s company at the time he was told to sign the contract with them, he must have known that after the first round of calls took place, the complaints came in about the calls showing Duke’s name on the caller ID and Jenkins told him to start laundering the payments to that company to cover up that fact.

The story is also posted to Talk to Action, where there is further discussion of the evidence going on in the comments.

Ed has also taken issue with a couple of minor points in Blumenthal’s report, to which Blumenthal has responded (somewhat testily) here.

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1. Tim Ireland has a new website, where materials about the dispute with Uzbek billionaire Alisher Usmanov are being posted.

2. The latest Private Eye (1194) has a couple of reports about Saudi billionaire Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz, whose many lawsuits have led to the pulping of books ranging “from Spartist to Neo-Con”. Fear of the Sheikh’s lawyers has resulted in newspapers and magazines self-censoring, and “no word” has been published about his recent move against the Cambridge University Press (a subject I blogged here), despite considerable media interest in the USA. According to the Eye (page 2):

Two weeks ago the Observer was set to run a column about Mahfouz by Nick Cohen, but then spiked it after a fit of legal collywobbles…the Spectator lined up a long piece about the litigious Sheikh by Brendan O’Neill, which listed all the titles pulped…it too was spiked at the last moment!

Cohen did make a general allusion to the situation on Sunday, when he wrote that

Britain’s repressive libel laws are becoming a threat to security and racial harmony. ‘Saudi money is now a major source of income for London libel firms,’ one lawyer told me. ‘School fees and second homes depend on it.’

A second piece in the same Eye profiles Mr Justice Eady

…who has found against reporters so often that the law lord Lord Hoffman slapped him down for being “hostile” to responsible journalism in the public interest.

Perhaps this is a bit harsh – Eady did recently find in favour of Searchlight in a case brought by the BNP.

3. A bit of historical context: BBC Radio 4 has an interesting documentary about the 1967 pop song “Flowers in the Rain”, and how the band behind it ended up being sued by Harold Wilson over satirical postcards which made reference to rumours about his private life. The Times review of the programme notes that once the court case was over

There was also a ban on any reproduction of the cartoon, or any disclosure of its contents, which remains in force even after 40 years. This is an area in which the BBC has to be careful – Wilson’s former secretary, Lady Falkender, sued it last year over BBC4’s drama The Lavender List and won £75,000 – so Radio 4 muffles this part of the documentary with interference to avoid any contempt of court.

The Lavender List was scripted Private Eye journalist Francis Wheen, and the Eye reported on that at the time of the settlement, back in April (1182):

The cravenness of this capitulation is quite extraordinary. Falkender hadn’t even issued a writ – merely dispatched a letter of complaint via the inevitable Carter-Fuck [sic] and Partners.

The programme carried an allegation that also appears in a memoir by another Wilson aide, and which is has not been subject to any action:

Reports of last week’s settlement said the BBC had apologised to Falkender “for a drama that claimed she had an affair with [Wilson]…” Actually, the film didn’t directly claim they had an affair. It quoted what Wilson himself told Joe Haines: that during one of her regular temper tantrums Falkender had said to Mary Wilson, “I went to bed with your husband five times in 1956 and it wasn’t satisfactory”.* But it also emphasised that Wilson denied any such affair…Falkender’s alleged comment to Mary Wilson was repeated last Thursday in the Daily Mail, whose lawyers are clearly made of sterner stuff…

The BBC has promised never to show the programme again.

*other sources for the quote say “six times in 1956”.

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Here’s something you don’t see every day, from BosNewsLife:

The founder of the Netherlands-based missionary organization Open Doors has confirmed that he baptized “scores of Muslim radicals” and he challenges other Christians to follow in his footsteps.

The missionary is the 79-year-old Dutchman Anne van der Bijl, a.k.a “Brother Andrew”, the founder of Open Doors:

Despite concerns about growing pressure on Christians in Islamic countries such as Afghanistan, Brother Andrew said he preached the love of Jesus Christ to militant groups such as the Taliban and Hamas, as well as to Muslim clerics in Iran.

He added that he was recently invited to appear on national television in Iran, and has visited Pakistan and Afghanistan, where a Taliban leader allegedly told him he’s welcome back at any time.

“Brother Andrew” is actually an interesting character, and he became a household name among evangelicals in the 1960s due to his efforts at smuggling Bibles into communist countries. Thanks to various ghost-writers, it has not always been completely clear where he himself is coming from: God’s Smuggler (1967), by the Pentecostals John and Elizabeth Sherrill, presents a spiritual man primarily concerned with spreading the gospel; Battle for Africa (1977), ghosted by Amway-enthusiast Charles Paul Conn, gives us a more hardboiled anti-communist crusader, who urges support for Rhodesia and South Africa. A 1990 essay by journalist Lawrence Jones suggested that Conn’s picture was closer to the truth:

Open Doors, a stridently anti-Communist ministry based in The Netherlands, published a comic book in both English and Afrikaans, which is distributed through the chaplain general’s office to all the troops .The comic book portrays the struggle between “democracy” and “communism” as the final contest between Christ and Antichrist.

The founder of Open Doors…calls himself Brother Andrew…In a recent speech to the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem, an American evangelical organization, Brother Andrew claimed that there’s a direct relationship between Israel and South Africa. The two nations were united in an end-times scenario. (1)

That would appear to put him firmly in the religious-right camp, but, surprisingly, in the 1990s he hooked up with Evangelicals for Middle East Understanding and with Donald Wagner, a prominent critic of Christian Zionism. The two of them visited the West Bank to investigate claims that Palestinian Christians were being persecuted by the Palestinian Authority, and came away with a report suggesting that the accusations were inaccurate, and had been orchestrated by the Israeli government and the Christian Embassy (which is not, by the way, “American”).

A more recent visit by Brother Andrew to Gaza was reported in the Christian Post in June:

While looting, sporadic violence, and instability still plague the newly Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, a Christian persecution group hopes that a long-established friendship between it and Hamas will keep the small Christian community relatively safe from targeted attacks.

…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.

When the Hamas leaders later were able to return to their countries, Brother Andrew in turn hosted meals for Hamas leaders where he would testify about the Gospel. The two built a friendship where they would mutually challenge each others religious beliefs but would do would do so with respect.

The new BosNewsLife report also contains a tactful reference to the South Korean missionaries who were kidnapped in Afghanistan:

…he cautioned that “a little more wisdom would be helpful”…

(1) “Divided Evangelicals in South Africa”, in Emile F. Sahliyeh, Religious Resurgence and Politics in the Contemporary World, p. 112.

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