Bartholomew's Notes

WorldNetDaily gets to grips with the riots in France, with…predictable results:

As rioting that began in a poor, mostly Muslim, neighborhood near Paris a week ago continues to spread to other suburbs and cities across France and parts of Europe, U.S. experts and at least one American lawmaker believe radical Islam is most likely responsible for the chaos.

So has WND‘s intrepid Jon Dougherty actually consulted some “experts” – you know, people who have an actual track record of studying France and its immigrant communities? Someone like, say, the Harvard-based Jocelyne Cesari, who wrote “Islam in France: the Shaping of a religious minority” (in Yvonne Haddad-Yazbek, ed., Muslims in the West, from Sojourners to Citizens, 2002, Oxford University Press, p 36-51)? Or perhaps Jonathan Laurence and Justin Vaisse, authors of the forthcoming Integrating Islam: Political and Religious Challenges in Contemporary France (2006, Brooking Institution Press)?

Well, of course, I’m being silly. “Expert” in WND-land means wingnut demagogue, and all the usual suspects are wheeled out. Here’s Robert Spencer:

“The rioters are part of a population that has never considered itself French”

To be fair, Spencer does at least go on to consider the role of urban deprivation, which is more than the others do, even though he uses that to jump to conclusions. Next, Lee Kaplan:

France’s quest to be “evenhanded” in its dealings with its massive Muslim immigration has backfired and now reached a point where Paris has little choice but to meet the problem head-on. In an interview with WND, he suggested that “with 5 million Muslims in France – the most in all of Europe,” this week’s chaos was inevitable.

…and, more absurd than ever, the inevitable Daniel Pipes:

“This isn’t comparable to the 1960s race riots in the U.S.,” he said. “This does have, deep down, an Islamic agenda of control, even if the kids doing the rioting aren’t cognizant of that” at the moment.

Some might be tempted to ask if Pipes has any evidence for his conspiracy theory, but I suppose that he long ago gave up actually having to justify himself academically when he discovered that vilification was an easier path.

Oh, and there’s the lawmaker, Tom “Jack D Ripper” Tancredo:

The real issue the French “are now dealing with,” he said, “is [that] you cannot integrate some people into your society.”

Meanwhile, over at another page, Jack Cashill accuses Europe for not fingering Islam as the true source of the riots (again, not based on any actual knowledge about France or its immigrant groups):

…This seemingly unprovoked mayhem by their musulman friends has embarrassed the French media into awkward apologetics and the European media into silence. Observing them, one begins to understand how Hitler was allowed to prosper.

“France herself is being attacked by foreign hordes,” claims the reliably outspoken Jean-Marie Le Pen at the end of the article. Indeed, in a continent of cowards and compromisers, it should not come as a surprise that citizens will turn to the first public figure who dares say anything at all.

OK…so Cashill’s saying that Jean-Marie Le Pen is enjoying a surge of popularity because he’s saying something true that no-one will dare to. Whereas Hitler…? Jack, think that one through for a bit…

(By the way, the same Jack Cashill who now lectures the media about facing the facts wrote a lengthy series in 2002 claiming that James Kopp, who had been charged with the murder of abortion provider Barnett Slepian, had in fact been framed by left-wing activists. That was before Kopp confessed; ConWebWatch has the full story. He’s also an Intelligent Design creationism propagandist, telling us that Darwin caused Hitler and Communism).

But complaining about WND stock pundits for spreading hysteria and hatred is like complaining about a bear for taking a crap in the woods. Even though the religious background of the Paris rioters may (it can still be debated) in reality be pretty well beside the point (as an article at alt-Muslim argues, quoting sociologist Laurent Mucchielli), it always was going to become a bandwagon for the US right, and no doubt there will be much more punditry to come. So, for those fainthearted enough to actually care about actual analysis, historical and social context, and so on, Cesari’s article is available on-line here. Here are some salient extracts (hyperlinked footnotes in original):

…Displays that grow in conspicuousness are blindly interpreted as evidence for renewed religious fervor. When, in the early 1980’s, immigrants built mosques, opened halal butcher shops, and claimed land for Muslim sections in cemeteries, the majority of the French people, scholars included, feared for a ‘return of Islam’. In actuality, the Muslims in question were not becoming more observant. Having resolved upon permanent residence in France, they were simply changing their attitude in favor of greater participation in French society.

…Muslims in France show extreme social and cultural heterogeneity. They identify differently with Islam according to their national origin, age, gender and social background. Nor can change within Muslim groups be understood independent of changes occurring within France itself. Dramatic forces at work upon French society may, in some cases, actually influence Muslim community more than its own internal dynamics.

…Within the academy, an initial total disregard for Islam has given way to a misunderstanding which resonates with the xenophobic distrust that has pervaded French society-at-large. Remarkable as it now seems, sociologists during the 1960’s and 1970’s actually studied North African immigration without even acknowledging the Muslim heritage of the immigrants concerned [4]. Having finally taken notice, these sociologists and their colleagues in political science [5] have misconstrued the increasing visibility of Muslims and their institutions as a sign that Islam is a phenomenon unto itself, impervious to those powerful secularizing [6] forces that have been shaping French life for generations. Few voices have been heard to the contrary, affirming that Muslims are — just like everybody else — subject to the laws that characterize socio-political change [7]. Few voices [8] have stated that the traditional Islamic devotion of parents is giving way to ever more individualized [9] and privatized [10] expressions of religiosity by their children.

And lest some think that Cesari is just some flaky Islamophile, she also noted the following (which also gives a bit of extra context to the cause of the current riots):

After the headscarf affair of 1989, which opened political eyes to Islam’s growing appeal to French-born Muslim youth, came the death of Khaled Kelkal in 1995. This young natural-born citizen of Algerian extraction was pursued and killed by police for his suspected part in a terrorist bombing campaign in Paris. His death raised the specter of alienated Muslim youth in run-down suburbs, turning to violent islamist groups that result in a rebel subculture.

Now, no-one has to agree with Cesari’s interpretation of Islam in France just because it’s come from someone who has actually lived in the country and done some detailed research. But could it at least be part of a sensible discussion about what’s going on, both in relation to the riots and more generally? I found Cesari (as well as Vaisse and Laurence) by just googling for two minutes. I don’t expect an outfit like WND to bother with such people, but could the mainstream media get on the case?

(Alt.Muslim link via The Revealer)

UPDATE: More at the World War 4 Report.

UPDATE 2: Newsweek actually has a quote from a French scholar, the half-Algerian anthropologist Dounia Bouzar.

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Burn him in a tub of tar
Burn him like a blazing star
Burn his body from his head
Then we’ll say old Pope is dead

If the UK government ever gets around to actually passing its proposed anti-religious hatred laws, perhaps tonight may be the last chance to see “anti-Popery” banners, and to witness the Pope being burned in effigy – both of which are hallowed traditions in Cliffe at Lewes, East Sussex.

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The New York Times reports on a dispute over the use of drugs in religious rituals:

The Bush administration tried to persuade the Supreme Court on Tuesday that federal narcotics policy should trump the religious needs of members of a small South American church who want to import a hallucinogenic tea that is central to their religious rituals.

The church is the Brazilian O Centro Espírita Beneficiente União do Vegetal (or “UDV”), which apparently has 130 members in the US. Full background on the case can be found at Religionlink; interestingly, the church’s argument is being supported by the ACLU, but opposed by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which believes a religious organisation should not receive an exemption from the law. The Church itself explains that:

“União do Vegetal” literally means “the union of the plants.” Central to UDV’s. Central to UDV’s religious tradition and practice is the sacramental use of hoasca, a tea made from two plants indigenous to the Brazilian Amazon – the vine banisteriopsis caapi and a bush botanically related to the coffee plant, psychotria viridis. Religious practitioners ritually prepare the tea and consider it sacred, much as Catholics believe the wine they take at communion to be a sacrament…The sacrament imbues UDV members with a heightened spiritual awareness that permits them to experience communion with God.

The Times, meanwhile, gives the legal context:

Although the case clearly has constitutional overtones, the issue before the court concerns not the First Amendment’s protection for religious practice but rather a federal statute, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Congress enacted that law in 1993 to give more protection to religious exercise than the Supreme Court itself was willing to provide in a 1989 decision that rejected the claim of members of an American Indian church to a constitutional right to use peyote in religious rituals.

Under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the government may not interfere with a religious practice unless it can demonstrate a “compelling” reason for doing so.

But if the UDV sacrament can be compared to the Catholic communion, there is also an earlier precedent. Back in 1989 Douglas Laycock of the University of Texas responded to the peyote dispute by asking:

Why is it that the religious use of wine was exempt everywhere during Prohibition, but the religious use of peyote is exempt in only half the states today? If Oregon may constitutionally punish the religious use of peyote, may it not also punish the religious use of wine? Could Oregon ban communion wine and require that all Christians use grape juice instead? The Supreme Court does not have to answer these questions formally; no case about wine is before it. But it should think hard about these questions, to make sure it is not suppressing a small and unfamiliar religion on the basis of principles it would not apply to a mainstream faith.

The archived website of the Peyote Foundation described the laws concerning peyote in the mid-1990s:

In Arizona, The Peyote Way Church of God and The Peyote Foundation can operate because of the exemption from prosecution is based on religious sincerity, not on race, denomination, or physical boundaries. Oregon has a similar statute with the exception of that it is specifically not applicable to the residents of correctional facilities.

Four other states have slightly more stringent requirements. Peyotists in Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado and Minnesota must be members of a bona fide religious organization, including the N.A.C. [Native American Church] or the American Indian Church. (Minnesota.) Some state’s statutes could legally permit a non-Native American to sit a peyote meeting if it was run by the N.A.C. Others require actual N.A.C. membership, some even of Native Americans. Unfortunately, Texas, the native habitat of the peyote cactus, has the strictest requirements for exemption from prosecution. Texas exceeds the federal guidelines by requiring that a person be not only a member of the N.A.C., but of at least 25% Native American descent.

However, although the Peyote Foundation won a court case in 1996 following a raid the year before, its website now says it has closed down “due to extreme political pressure”.

UDV was founded in 1961 by José Gabriel da Costa, and can be classed as a New Religious Movement. According to its doctrinal statement:

The UDV bases its teachings in the evolutionist principle of reincarnation, a millenary precept adopted by Eastern spirituality as well as the first Christians until the 5th century A.D.

…The UDV affirms that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is part of the divine totality and his word reveals the true path to salvation for humanity.

This means their church is open to new members, although they are rather picky:

The União do Vegetal does not advertise to recruit members…An interested person seeks out the União through its members. After an interview regarding his/her motives and personal state, the newcomer is given a comfortable examination period before deciding whether to become a member.

The church also argues that a legal victory would not make psychoactive drugs more generally available:

The accommodation being granted to the UDV is based upon its legitimacy, the history of its religious use of the hoasca tea, and the absence of evidence that it is harmful or would be diverted to illegal use. Another group wishing to utilize a psychoactive substance that is also central to their religious practice must be prepared to prove their case in court, if the government continues to maintain that it had a compelling interest in prohibiting the use of that substance. The accommodations for religious use under RFRA do not extend to “recreational use,” as the district court and appeals court opinions have made very clear. There is no “slippery slope”.

However, French libertarian Christian Michel makes the following observation:

From January 1919, American Catholic priests were required to obtain authorisation from the Federal administration to buy Communion wine. Prohibition had begun. During twelve long years, the production, trade and consumption of alcoholic drinks was totally prohibited in the United States. Very soon, there mushroomed numerous, ostensibly Christian, sects for the purpose of celebrating, with administrative dispensation, the Holy Communion in both kinds. Observers noted the remarkable zeal which the faithful showed in taking consecrated wine.

(Tipped from Get Religion)

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Thanks to an invitation from Bene Diction, I currently have a post over at Spero News on Christian anti-gay activist (and pseudo-scholar) Paul Cameron. It follows on from a blog entry I wrote on the subject a while back.

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Charisma editor J Lee Grady highlights resentment over the behaviour of some American neo-Pentecostal pastors abroad, in a report from the Netherlands (link added):

…while [an] influx of Africans, Asians and Middle Easterners is helping to revitalize Dutch churches, the influence of some Americans has not had the same effect. I was shocked and embarrassed to learn that charismatic evangelists from the United States have earned a dubious reputation on the other side of the Atlantic.

…One of Holland’s most respected charismatic pastors, Stanley Hofwijks, says some American ministers are no longer welcome in his country. Hofwijks’ 2,500-member Maranatha Ministries Church is predominantly Surinamese and is one of the largest congregations in Holland.

The main problem is that some American ministers insist on having their own offerings when they visit local churches, and call for rather steep contributions (up to $1,000). These ministers also demand excessive fees, as local Christian Arie Templeman tells Grady:

…On one occasion an American preacher who was speaking at a Dutch conference was asked if he could come to another city and address a group of pastors. Said Templeman: “[The evangelist] asked how much he would be paid for the ministry session. When he was told he would receive $1,000, he looked down at his shoes and said: ‘One of my shoes costs more than that. I will not go.’“

Alas, no names are named…

Hofwijks’ biggest concern is that American arrogance is infecting some younger Dutch leaders. “They want to be like the preachers on American television,” the pastor said. “They are focused on a superstar mentality. It’s very negative for our country because they fall and many people fall with them.”

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Paleojudaica links to a bizarre story in the Nigerian Vanguard:

NIGERIA’S dogged cultural researcher, and erstwhile senior special assistant to the President on Arts and Culture, Catherine Acholonu-Olumba recently teamed up with India’s computer engineer and IT specialist, Ajay Prebhaka, winner of several awards as an upcoming computer “whiz kid” to undertake the most painstaking and ambitious cultural research project ever carried out on the shores of Africa.

The intrepid duo apparently discovered and translated “350 ancient stones” from Ikom in Cross River State. They concluded that

…Africa was home to a celestial, high technology civilization based in the present day location of the Sahara Desert – a civilization that was decimated by the deluge and by the war of the gods of antiquity, the hallmarks of which included the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid of Egypt.

the Ikom stone writings were the original source-book of the ancient Sumerian epic of creation, Euuma Ellsh, dated 6000 B.C. (the original source of Genesis) and of The book of the Secrets of Enoch; that the delta location of the monoliths was the limed global seaport of Tilmun, from where great ships sailed the global seas of antiquity supplying gold, palm produce, spices, dates and copper; that Mount Cameroon (known as “The Chariots of the God” ) was the Mecca and Rome of antiquity…

Ikom stone writings gave away their sacred language – The Garamma Language – the Lost Mother Tongue of mankind, the origin of the Hebrew Qabbala and the “Tera-gramm” name of Yaweh. Off-shoots of the Garamma writing include Nsibidi of Ekpe cult of Southern Nigeria and the Ogham sacred writings of the Celtic dwarfs (Druids) of ancient British Isles.

“Celtic dwarfs”?

The article tells us that “evidence abounds”, but anyone who wants to know what that evidence actually is needs to buy the book, Garamma: Stone writings of African Adam. According to the report, this book will be “launched in various African countries and in the African diaspora soon”, a rather curious distribution strategy for someone with claims supposedly significant for the scholarly world in general.

This is the second Vanguard report on the subject. The previous one, which covered much the same ground, ends with the note:

When Dr. Acholonu completes her work, and it becomes public knowledge in Nigeria and the rest of the world, her findings will permanently alter the status of Calabar and Cross River State and perhaps, as a nation, we will have another World Heritage Site. See how academia can contribute to the growth of tourism?

And the story itself broke last month in the Daily Sun (“Nigeria’s King of the Tabloids”):

Some 350 ancient stones, called monoliths found in Ikom are said to bear writings with the exact layout as those found in France dating to the Upper Paleolithic Period of 18,000 BC –12,000 BC. Acholonu and Prabhakar deciphered these writings and found that they contain the names of gods of Egypt and Mesopotamia and what they say are astronomical details such as the names of stars in various ancient languages and records of celestial events contained in ancient scriptures.

“The interpretation of the writings reveal the name of the language in which it is written. It says that the writing is called Gram (which is the origin of the words tetragram (the Hebrew name of God), penta-gram, grammar, milli-gramme and its multiple intonation of the name of Ham which shows that it is a heritage of Ham, the ancestor of the black race.

Alas for Acholonu, “tetragram” is not the Hebrew name for God. All it means is “four letters”, as a way of referring to the actual name given the Bible, which is YHWH (often spelt in translation with vowels added as “Yahweh”). And the word “tetragram” is derived from Greek, not Hebrew, and as “Tetragrammaton” first appeared in English in 1592 (Oxford English Dictionary; I don’t know if the word can be found in other languages earlier). This is just one small point that may help judge the rest of the thesis. The mysterious stones, meanwhile, are perhaps the akwanshi, which according to the Britannica are

circles of large stones…from one to six feet high, carved in low relief to represent human figures. They are thought to be no earlier than the 16th century.

No mention of inscriptions, though.

Acholonu is the author of Motherism: The Afrocentric Alternative to Feminism, she is the author of a number of scholarly books and articles, none of which appear to relate to her current, Graham Hancock-like, excesses. However, her role as cultural advisor to the president was not without controversy. This Day reported last year:

Acholonu’s first effort to establish her presence was in 1999 during the Chris Ofili brouhaha. She came out strongly to condemn the London -based Nigerian artist for using elephant dung in his portrayal of the Virgin Mary in a painting of the same title. She argued that Ofili’s reason for using elephant dung as symbol for fertility and growth was of poppycock and was simply a figment of his imagination. She concluded by asking if Ofili could actually paint his mother using elephant dung. Like Mayor Rudolph Guiliani and several others, Achlonu found this work by the I998 Turner Prize winner, which was part of the Sensation exhibition at the Brooklyn museum, in 1999, very offensive.

But her reaction to this issue, rather then win support of the artists, infuriated them. In a expeditious reaction Mike Omoighe, lecturer at the Yaba College of Technology lashed out at Acholonu, saying that her utterances were misguided. Her view, he pointed out, was prejudiced and based on sentiment and not objectivity. Sighting examples from Nigeria and different African countries, he emphasized that dung is indeed a symbol of growth and fertility.

However, Acholonu’s Indian collaborator Ajay Prabhakar remains obscure.

UPDATE: Local paper The Tide has more:

Prof. Catherine Acholonu-Olumba and Mr Ajay Prabhakar, Country Ambassador and Programmes Co-ordinator respectively for the United Nations (UN) Forum of Arts and Culture, have provided details of their finding in a book co-authored by them.

…The research result was first presented before a global audience at the round table on Inter-cultural dialogue hosted by United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) as part of the Black Heritage festival, in Badagry, Lagos, in May 2001.

Subsequently, the research team was hosted by the Black academics and Black communities in many states in the U.S, the statement said.

Among the “key discoveries” made in the course of the research was that the geographical area marked in the monolith joining of Rivers Niger and Benue represented the geometric ” centre of then [sic] Earth”.

Also, Nigeria is exactly at the place identified in the Bible book of Genesis as the centre of Eden, where the Tree of Life was located.

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ASSIST links to a website with some background to the recent anti-Coptic riot in Alexandria [sic for typos]:

Mr. Mostafa El Bakry, Chief Editor and CEO of El Osboa Newspaper stated that a play was performed at Saint George and Antonious Coptic Church, that insulted Islam and the Muhamed the profit. He demanded an apology from the church and the Pope.

– Same week, Thousands of CDs were distributed in Cairo colleges and labeled “Ramadan Gift”. The CD contained the Play. In the begining of the play there was a comment; “This play is blessed and approved by Pope Shenouda” …This CD was distributed by either Islamic extremists and/or Security Forces.

– El Sheikh Aly Gomaa from El Azhar and Pope Shenouda confirmed that the play did not insult Muslims.

…A daily news paper called “Al Fager – Dawn“, has confirmed that isalmic fanatic have released a fatwa that killing pope shenouda is Halal “ok by religion”…

But most worrying:

A massacre planed by the Extremists is to take place on Friday 10-28-05

The Fanatic Extremists newspaper claimed that they are going to have a massacre for all Christians, Priests, and Pastors. They started putting signs and marks on some Christians, priests, and pastor’s houses.

Most Christians are considering leaving their homes fearing for their lives and their loved one’s after their houses have being marked.

Some expect that this might happen also on Tuesday 11-1-05

WE CRY OUT FOR HELP … BEFORE ANOTHER RWANDA ETHNIC CLEANSING HAPPENS

Uppity Copts complaining has been a subject of Mustafa al-Bakri and his news weekly Al-Osbou before. Al-Ahram explains in this 1998 report:

Hafez Abu Se’eda, secretary-general of the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights (EOHR), has been remanded in custody for fifteen days pending trial on serious charges of harming Egypt’s national security.

Abu Se’eda’s arrest came almost a week after a press campaign was launched against human rights groups which receive foreign funding, especially EOHR…The prosecutor general is investigating charges made by the privately-owned Al-Osbou newspaper that EOHR received a $25,000 cheque from the British Embassy in return for a report it had issued on the alleged persecution of Copts in the southern village of Al-Kosheh.

A Sunday Times report on Al-Kosheh apparently contained some inaccuracies; a report from the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders added that “EOHR appears to have been made a scapegoat for Egyptian authorities anger over an article in a foreign newspaper”.

Then in 2004:

The independent weekly newspaper Al- Osbou’ on Monday launched an attack on a conference held in Zurich, Switzerland entitled, “Egypt’s Copts, a minority under siege”. “The extremist Zionist Daniel Pipes headed the participants: a suspect alliance in Zurich between the American right and some members of the Coptic expatriate community,” wrote Al-Osbou’ in the headline of one article.

…In commentary Al-Osbou’ wrote: “The Zurich conference is no different than its predecessors which utilised the Coptic minority as a pressure card and pretext to solicit foreign intervention in Egypt’s affairs. The American right wing is inciting expatriate Copts to raise a furore at a time when [the US] is targeting Syria, the Sudan, occupying Iraq, and massacres increasing in Palestine. The aim is to put Egypt in a defensive position or at least mar domestic moves being undertaken to attain change. They want Egypt weak, easy to extort and submitting to the US and Israeli agenda.”

Well, Pipes is certainly objectionable, although I don’t blame the Copts for seeking out a powerful ally. But of course, the joke is that it’s the likes of al-Bakri that provide much of his ammo (al-Bakri is also good for providing MEMRI fodder).

The US State Department also notes the following about al-Bakri:

During 2004 and 2005, allegations in several countries claimed that the United States was trying to impose a “new American Koran” on Muslims.

These claims are false. A small, private evangelical Christian group in the United States has written a book called The True Furqan, which seeks to convert Muslims to Christianity, but this group has no connection with the U.S. government. Furqan is another term for Koran.

…Mustafa Bakri, editor of Egypt’s sensationalist, anti-U.S. Al-Usbu newspaper, made other false claims in the newspaper’s December 6, 2004 edition:

The first edition of The True Koran was published secretly in the United States and Israel.

The True Koran was drafted with direct Israeli participation and with direct instructions from U.S. President George Bush.

Twelve more books will be published as part of The True Furqan series.

Bakri has a long history of making disinformation claims. Abbas al Janabi, who served as the personal secretary to Saddam’s son Uday from the mid 1980s until 1998, said in 2003 that Bakri had long been on Saddam’s payroll and was “very loyal to Saddam.”…

Al-Ahram, however, blames a different tabloid for the incendiary story about the Coptic DVD:

Last week’s sectarian tension in Alexandria began in much the same way previous Muslim-Christian disputes had: with the publication of a tabloid story. This time, the newspaper in question — Al-Midan — published an article about a church play that defamed Islam. The play — which begins with a poor Christian university student converting to Islam after a group of Muslim men offer him money to do so — was called I was blind but now I can see. The twist in the plot comes when the convert later decides to return to Christianity. The same Muslims then threaten him with violence.

…Sameh Fawzi, the editor of Watani (My Nation), a prominent Coptic newspaper, says that “reading a number of tabloid newspapers will clearly reveal how a sensitive topic like religion is often manipulated to pit Muslims and Christians against each other.” Several newspapers, for instance, have recently been running stories claiming that churches are doing intensive missionary work among university students across the country

…Waleed Orabi, the journalist who wrote the Al-Midan story, said he had obtained a CD of the performance from a source inside the Alexandria church where the play took place. He refused to provide any other details on the matter.

Al-Midan (which should not be confused with a Communist newspaper of the same name based in Sudan) is known for sensationalism. The Jewish Virtual Library gives a nice example:

In an article in the ‘Al-Midan’ newspaper of late March [2001], the writer Abu Bakr deals with the children’s game ‘Pokemon’, claiming that the game cards containing Pokemon figures encourage Western thought, animal worship and the theory of evolution. In an article dealing with the same subject which was published afterwards, the author claimed that the Pokemon figures appearing on bags of Israeli-Jewish produced potato chips prove his claims.

In the same year, allegedly inaccurate reporting of the views of Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi in the newspaper led to a bizarre court case in which an Islamist lawyer tried to force her husband to divorce her.

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With a tragic murder in California, the peddlers of Satanic panic are back in business. Over to Jim Kouri, vice-president of the National Association of Chiefs of Police and wingnut pundit at MichNews.com:

The news coverage of the extraordinarily brutal murder of Pamela Vitale, wife of well-known California criminal defense attorney Daniel Horowitz, seems to have renewed interest in ritualistic crime. The 16-year old suspect is reported to have been involved in some kind of self-styled Satanism including the reading the Anton LeVay’s [sic – should be LaVey, of course. He gets it right later] Satanic Bible and use of occult symbols at the crime scene.

But, in just the first of many leaps of logic to come, Kouri asserts that this “some kind of self-styled Satanism” actually reveals a wider Satanic trend:

In spite of mankind’s advances in the arts and sciences, there remains a large number of people who have not been able to — or refuse to — shake-off the practices of pagan rituals, some of which date back thousands of years.

Unlike the rituals of Christianity, of course…

Included within the broad spectrum of paganism are so-called Satanic cults which are suspect in a number of bizarre crimes throughout the United States:

According to investigative journalist and author Maury Terry, there exists today a network of Satan-worshiping cults with members crisscrossing our nation. Terry, whose research takes him to just about every state of the union, participated in a special regional police conference in Ohio, co-sponsored by the American Federation of Police and the National Association of Chiefs OF Police.

Terry apparently thinks “Son of Sam” David Berkowitz was involved in a wider Satanic plot, but had to change one his books following a libel action. Kouri ploughs on:

The world of the Satanic cultist is filled with ritualistic violence, perverse sexual activity and abuse, Heavy Metal music and the use of illegal drugs such as marijuana, amphetamines (crank, speed, meth, crystal), psylocybin (an hallucinogenic drug similar to LSD), heroin and other others. This is a world which, even in the beginning of the 21st Century,  continues to attract a large number of young people who follow the precepts of Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible, a volume that has millions of copies in print today.

Millions? James R Lewis of CESNUR writes the following:

One measure of The Satanic Bible’s appeal is that it has continuously been in print since it first appeared in 1970, and has been translated into a number of other languages. I have been unable to obtain recent figures, but in his 1991 book, In Pursuit of Satan, Robert Hicks mentions a sales figure of 618,000 copies (p. 351). There were also a number of illegal foreign language editions. These include a Spanish translation published in Mexico in the 70s, a Danish translation in the 80s, and a Russian translation in the late 90s. Legal editions include Czech and Swedish translations in the mid 90s and a 1999 German edition. The French translation has been completed but not yet printed. Also, the rights for a Greek translation were purchased, but the book does not seem to have appeared.

Not exactly The Satan-Driven Life, then. Lewis adds:

In addition to escaping institutional bounds and taking on a life of its own as the principal source document for a loose, anarchistic Satanist “movement,” The Satanic Bible came to play a role in the Satanic Ritual Abuse scare of the 1980s and 1990s…Despite the fact that LaVey explicitly rejected unlawful activity-especially blood sacrifice-in The Satanic Bible, the discovery of a copy of this widely-available book at a crime scene was often sufficient evidence for investigators to label the crime Satanic. (We might note that the similar presence of a Christian Bible at a crime scene has never led police to label the crime Christian.

Kouri, perhaps with an eye-out for the lawyers, goes on to note that Michael Aquino’s Temple of Set operates within the law. However, Satanic cults are another matter:

…According to Ed Briggs, crime reporter for the Richmond Times-Dispatch , Satanic cults seduce teenagers and young adults with sex and drugs and the promise of power over others. Also, involvement in this religion is the ultimate in rebellion against parental control, especially if the parents are religious Christians, Jews, Muslims, or part of any mainstream religious organization — even Religious Satanism which is recognized by the federal government as a legitimate religion deserving of all privileges enjoyed by Christian, Jewish, Muslim, etc. churches and temples.

Apparently Briggs wrote a couple of articles in the late 1980s on the topic. But it’s hardly news – we’ve always known that small groups of teenagers get up to this sort of thing (as in the recent case in Italy, which I blogged on at the time). Kouri then starts going further off the rails:

How many Satanic practitioners are there in the US? 

“The adherents of this violent [quasi-]religion number over 300,000, ” claims Lieutenant Larry Jones of the Boise, ID Police Department.

No explanation is given for where this figure has come from; Adherents.com provides some alternative statistics, the most sensible sources coming up with around 3,000 to 20,000. But Larry Jones is notoriously unreliable, and the fact that someone of Kouri’s position can take him seriously is very worrying. Witchvox has the lowdown, particularly Jones’s links with fake ex-Satanists turned Christian fundamentalists like Rebecca Brown and Mike Warnke (who are both unaccountably still in business, by the way), among much else.

But it gets worse:

…Although there have been reports of human sacrifices, especially infanticide, these incidents are extremely rare.

Unless they’re not:

Those claiming they are not rare but routine say that the infants used in the monstrous ceremony is one that has been conceived and raised just for the purpose of ritual murder. These police officers — Sandi Gallant among them — say that birth records of these babies do not exist since the children are born using midwife who’s a member of the group or even a physician-member.

This story has been around for years; lack of evidence has been no bar to its perpetuation.

Kouri then goes on to resurrect Pat Pulling from 1980s obscurity. Pulling is a rather sad figure – her son committed suicide in 1982, which inspired her on a crusade against Dungeons & Dragons:

…Who is drawn to this religion? Who gets involved in demonic activity? Well, a profile was developed by Pat Pulling, the leading expert in this area of psychology. The profile is similar in structure to those developed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Behavioral Science Unit. In fact, the creator of the Criminal Profiling System, Special Agent Robert Ressler, during his interviews with over 100 serial-killers and unusually  violent criminals, found elements of the occult in the psyche of a few of these killers.

“Elements” of the occult in “a few”! Damning indeed. I wonder how the incidence of these “elements” compares with incidences of other forms of religious mania, though? Kouri does not bother to ask.

After a digression into a survery of Santeria and voodoo, Kouri concludes with a discussion of the difficulties of investigating Satanic crime (i.e. the lack of any evidence):

…Investigators arriving at the crime scene of a homicide or suicide should remain open-minded with regard to possible ritualism or Satanic connections to the crime.

Even if that means being so open-minded the brains falling out.

(Tipped from The Pagan Prattle and Bulldada Newsblog)

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While increasing numbers of Christians see recent hurricanes, earthquakes and wars as signs of the inevitable end times, other religious traditions have a different tack on what needs to be done. WebIndia123 reports from Madhya Pradesh:

A Japanese god woman buried herself alive underground in “Samadhi”, a state of complete meditation in Hinduism, as she prayed on Thursday for world peace and bringing back natural order to earth in times of natural disasters and tragedies affecting the world.

Yogmata Japaki, a Buddhist by birth, was on a strict fast for the past two days, a pre-requisition for attaining “Samadhi”, as she climbed into the 15-feet-deep earthen pit in front of a massive crowd of devotees in Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh, who prayed and sang in her honour.

Japaki would stay in the underground samadhi for 72 hours without food or water.

The report notes her many supporters, including “Pilot Baba” and Russian “holy man” Henry Giri. It also adds:

It is not the first time that a Japanese god woman is undertaking such an ordeal. During the holy Hindu festival of Maha-Kumbh in Allahabad in 2001 when the largest gathering of mankind at a single place took place, a similar ritual was successfully performed by another Japanese yogi Keiko Aikawa.

Aikawa is also known as Yogmata Kaila Giri, and she runs an ashram in Tokyo; I have been unable to track down whatever Yogmata Japaki’s “secular” name may be. Both women, however, are followers of the aforementioned Pilot Baba, and these burials are a regular feature at the yearly Kumbha Mela festival (click here for a pic of Keiko Aikawa from 1992; page also contains some nudity). The one in 2001 received media attention:

Thousands thronged Tuesday to the camp of an Air Force pilot-turned-ascetic, Mahayogi Pilot Baba, when a Japanese disciple of his emerged out of a “living grave” after 72 hours underground.

Renamed by him as “Yogmata Kaila Giri Ma,” the middle-aged Japanese woman, Keiko Aikawa, had been “buried” eight feet underground on January 20.

…It took some time before “Pilot Baba” could persuade the crowds to maintain order. The “Yogmata” then blessed the enthusiastic crowd, that included several Japanese men and women.

Commencing with a recital of Hindu ritualistic chant of “Om”, followed by the Indian greeting of “namaste”, she spoke in broken English and delivered a message of peace and happiness to the devotees.

Pilot Baba himself got a similar notice on CNN back in 1996:

Pilot Baba, Indian air force officer-turned-yogi, climbed out of a damp hole in the ground Thursday to the cheers of some 10,000 admirers.

…”I had to minimize my breathing and survive without anything. No eating or drinking,” the 57-year-old yoga adept said after his return to the surface.

“Breath is the bridge between the soul and the body. You have to go beyond the mind. The very first thing is to remove the mind.”

Pilot Baba (also known as Kapil Adwait) explains his mission on his website:

His adventures, his teachings have always been different, true to life, more close to life, enabling a common man to know its strength and rise above the mundane living, though living in it. He is on a mission of “WORLD PEACE CAMPAIGN” and has been travelling the world over, teaching and making people experience the art of meditation, the art of Samadhi or the art of Realisation. Its true meaning and sanctity.

The Deccan Herald has further details:

He believes that he was saved from the jaws of death, when he was flying the MIG in the Ladakh region, by the divine intervention of Goraknath Hari Baba.

(I assume this is Goraksanath, one of the five ancient gurus of the Nath cult, which venerates Shiva)

Soon after this incident, Pilot Baba, an officer with the Indian Air Force resigned from the IAF and took sanyas in 1974. He devoted his time and knowledge to mastering the teachings of Goraknath Hari Baba.

…In his new avatar, Baba has undertaken numerous samadhis for world peace in water, in air tight containers and in glass chambers. He believes that world peace is possible only through meditation, collective thought and by praying together. “Success can be achieved through meditation and the power of collective thought,” said Baba.

…Baba has established several Ashrams in Nainital, Haridwar, Jaipur, Tokyo, Bhopal and Guna. He has also worked with Indira Gandhi and Sanjay Gandhi for world peace.

He is also president of the Mahayog Foundation, as the website for that organisation explains:

Mahayogi Pilot Baba is Mahamandaleshwar [i.e. sect leader] of the Juna Akhara [a monastic “order”] and a Himalayan Master from a lineage which traces its ancestry to Kripacharya of the Mahabharata.

He has taken jal (underwater) samadhi, bhumigat (underground) samadhi and samadhi in air-tight containers with the sankalpa of world peace and to enliven consciousness. Several of his disciples have also taken bhugarbha or sthal samadhi, at his instance, to promote peace and goodwill.

New Age magazine Enlightenment concentrates more on his supposed miraculous abilities:

…he buries himself underground, encases himself in an airtight glass box, or submerges himself under water-for days or even weeks at a time. Employing an ancient yogic technique that could best be described as a sort of human hibernation-plus, Pilot Baba is purported to be able to voluntarily shut down all bodily functions to the point that he is clinically dead, only to return to life at a pre-specified date and time-a feat that has withstood the scrutiny of at least some Western scientists.

He also claims various miraculous abilities, such as being able to divert a river and a few Jesus-like exploits, such as walking on water and dissipating storm clouds. However, those of a sceptical disposition might note certain features of the following:

It was the middle of last April in the central Indian town of Dewas, and Pilot Baba had again entered into an airtight glass case where he was to remain motionless for four days. In order to prevent the 110-degree desert heat from causing the case to explode, it had been surrounded by curtains which would be drawn back for brief darshan [viewing] periods several times each morning and evening. On the third evening, everything seemed to be proceeding as usual. But at 8pm, when the curtains were drawn open for the third time that night, “a quick hush went over the crowd.” As filmmaker Andre Vaillancourt, who was there to document the event, describes it, “I squinted . . . in order to catch a glimpse of Baba. As the words [of the crowd] came to my ears, the picture came into focus: Baba is gone! Vanished! Dematerialized! Only his orange dhoti [robe] lay on the spot where he sat.”

Particularly unimpressed is the Indian Rationalist Association, whose president, B. Premanand, relates the following:

On October 20th, 1980, Pilot Baba held a religious tamasha of underground samadhi by Khareshwari Baba for 10 days, along with a conference on Vedanta and Ramayana to be followed by a “Panchkundi” Gayatri mahayajna. Lakhs of rupees were collected by Pilot Baba for this. Khareshwari Baba was lowered into a pit of 10 feet deep and 3.5 feet square which could contain only 122.5 cubic feet of air, less the swami’s body. On the 10th day, when the pit was opened, the body of the baba had decomposed as he had died of dehydration, as the maximum time he could have survived in the pit was less than 24 hours unless Pilot Baba had arranged fresh air supply by some method into the pit.

He goes on to write a J’accuse to the yogi:

The death of Khareshwari Baba was a brutal murder by you with the connivance of the government officials and the organisers of your show.

A later report from Rationalist International adds another accusation:

In 1992, Sanal Edamaruku exposed the godman Pilot Baba who claimed that he survived in meditation under water for five days without breathing. Pilot Baba’s under-water feat attracted national and international attention. He constructed a huge swimming pool in a Delhi public park, climbed down in front of a crowd of 4000, ordered water to be pumped in and stayed there underwater for four days. That was at least the claim.

But Edamaruku and his assistants exposed him. They found out that there was a special secret pipeline connection. Though water was pumped in, the tarpaulin-covered pool did not get wet inside, and the Baba had a comfortable time on its dry ground. Four years later, in 1996, he tried it again. This time he claimed to stay for four days buried under the earth. Edamaruku exposed him again in front of television cameras. This time he was sitting comfortably in an underground dug-up room.

We might also question some his “global peace and goodwill” platitudes, if this 2004 account is accurate:

Akharas [Hindu monastic orders] are low profile but some of its leaders are involved in the current nationalist struggle of the ruling BJP. Pilot Baba, an ex air-force pilot who had a divine vision in mid-air during a flight, is a vocal opponent of any compromise in the controversial Ayodhya impasse that has plagued northern India for years. In this small town in Uttar Pradesh, the birthplace of Rama, a fifteenth century mosque was torn down in 1992 by an armed mob of Hindu fundamentalists, connected with the ruling party.

However, an interview in the Hindustan Times (which notes his “makeshift tented palace, which boasts of all comforts of a millionaire’s home”) is rather more conciliatory:

“The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) are good organisations with extremely good manpower for promoting Hindu Dharma, but their agenda against other religions and communities is dangerous for mankind…If the political will had been there, the Ram temple could have been built within 24 hours. The heads of the two warring communities should sit together and sort out all their differences. All political parties want to keep the issue alive, so that they can use it to come back to power’”.

Pilot Baba can also take credit as a bit of a feminist, as this report notes:

The Simhastha Kumbh 2004 has thrown up unexpected surprises.

Perhaps for the first time in Kumbh’s history, female sadhvis [i.e. female ascetics] are breaking the glass ceiling and are coming to their own.

…”Things are changing, but some people refused to let sadhvis rise on grounds of morality,” said Pilot Baba, sadhu.

Nonetheless, the rise in empowerment of women in the secular aspects of life was bound to be reflected in the religious side.

No doubt Pilot Baba’s Japanese follower will emerge from her pit unscathed, as usual. What will, one suspects, be harder to establish is whether she has really done anything to “bring back natural order” to the earth…

(Tipped from The Revealer)

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Latest news from the Israeli religious right, via Arutz Sheva:

On Thursday night, Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri said, “Jews must come to the land of Israel to receive our righteous Mashiach (Messiah), who has begun his influence and will reveal himself in the future.”

…During the afternoon Mincha prayer on Yom Kippur, the Kabbalist scholar surprised his students and fellow worshippers with secrets relating to the coming of the Mashiach…Only after some 45 minutes, the Rabbi raised his head and looked around the room at the students and worshippers who were gathered at his Nachalat Yitzhak Yeshiva, in the Bucharim neighborhood of Jerusalem. With a broad smile on his face familiar to his students when he has a revelation, he declared, “With the help of G-d, the soul of the Mashiach [i.e. “Messiah”] has attached itself to a person in Israel”.

Kaduri is 104 years old, and his esoteric mysticism is in no way otherworldly: back in 1996 he was part of the election campaign for the religious Shas party, blessing magical amulets for that purpose; he later split with Shas to create Ahavat Yisrael. But he has wider appeal: the Likud foreign minister Silvan Shalom recently presented Prince Charles with one of the Rabbi’s amulets as a wedding present. Kaduri is also a supporter of the unofficial “Sanhedrin” which was recently established by Israeli rightists, and he shares their detestation of democracy, as a quote in this document shows:

“The revolution has begun”, exclaimed the overwhelmed hundred-year-old kabbalistic rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri. “We want a monarchic regime in place of the current fascist regime which only pretends to be democratic. And we want the Temple of Jerusalem”.

Kaduri has also stated that Sharon will be the final prime minister.

(Some may be shocked by the use of the word “fascist”, but in fact rightist Israelis throw Nazi epithets around quite casually. While I was in Jerusalem in 1993-4, everywhere I looked there were posters with Yitzhak Rabin’s head superimposed on a Nazi uniform).

The Arutz Sheva report also gives Kaduri’s timetable for the Messiah’s appearance, based on his interpretations of the writings of a mystic known as the Vilna Gaon:

On September 24, 2001, Channel One Israel TV broadcast an item on what Torah and other mystics were saying in the wake of the World Trade Center attack. Speaking from the room adjacent to where Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri receives visitors, Arutz Sheva Hebrew radio showhost Yehoshua Meiri, a close confident of the Kabbalist, explained to the cameras Rabbi Kaduri’s understanding of the events based on the calculations of the Vilna Gaon: “On Hashanah Rabba, the actual war of Gog and Magog will commence and will last for some seven years,” said Meiri. [ Click here to view the Channel One clip in Hebrew and Rabbi Kaduri’s prediction communicated by Meiri at the 1:40 minute mark.]

Precise to the minute, 13 days later on October 7th as the sun was setting and the Jewish holiday of Hoshana Rabba was ushered in, US and British forces began an aerial bombing campaign targeting Taliban forces and Al-Qaida.

So, apparently, while the person who will be the Messiah is around at this moment, he will not actually become the Messiah until two more years have passed. But who will the “Messiah” be? Most likely, Kaduri is backing Rabbi Yosef Dayan, who claims to be the legitimate King of Israel, and who recently uttered a death curse against Sharon. But if the Messiah must be Sharon’s successor, perhaps Kaduri (pictured here) has a more likely candidate in mind…?

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