Bartholomew's Notes

Interfax reports on plans for a protest against gay marriage outside the French embassy in Moscow, including a handy round-up of the groups involved:

Apart from Russian Mothers, the protest is expected to involve representatives of the God’s Will organization, Family and the World, the Trade Union of Russian Citizens, the Association of Orthodox Experts, the Eurasian Youth Union, the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia, the Union of Orthodox Citizens, the Orthodox Action Corporation, the Christian Solidarity Foundation, and the Coalition for Morality.

Some of the same groups recently held a protest outside the US embassy, in protest against the imposition of American values.

Russian Mothers is headed by Irina Bergset (var. “Irina Bergseth”). She was formerly married to a Norwegian, and she alleges that Norwegian authorities gave custody of her sons to her ex-husband despite her claim that he was a child sex abuser. Bergset also paints a lurid picture of Norway in general as a country that  promotes paedophilia, and her accusations include the bizarrely grotesque claim that her younger son was gang-raped while being forced wear a “Putin suit”.

Bergset further claims that social service interventions involving mixed Russian-Finnish families in Finland are due to “the ideology of feminism”, and in March, she organised a “Protect the Children” rally following the death of a Russian adoptee in the USA. An apparently critical account in English of some of  her claims appeared in the Moscow Times piece, which unfortunately is behind a subscription-only paywall; her ex-husband was interviewed in Russian media here.

God’s Will, meanwhile, came to notice in March, when it protested against evolution at a natural history museum; I discussed the group and its leader Dmitriy Enteo here.

Details of “Family and World” are scarce, although Bergset announced recently that:

…three organizations “Family and World”, “Russian Billion” and “Russian Mothers” representing parental and pro-family [groups] from 52 regions of the Russian Federation, and also a number of regional public organizations, declared the intention “to create in the nearest future active political family and parental structure”, namely fraction at Great Fatherland party.

The Trade Union of Russian Citizens (website here) famously attempted to sue Madonna for $10 million after she spoke in favour of gay rights at a concert in St Petersberg (the lawsuit was dismissed).

The Association of Orthodox Experts appeared on this blog in 2010, when it declared that the Iceland volcano eruption might be God’s wrath against gays and pagans.

The Eurasian Youth Union is headed by Alexander Dugin; according to a profile from the School of Russian and Asian Studies:

Dugin is a former member of the nationalist group Pamyat, which bills itself as a “People’s National Patriotic Orthodox Christian Movement” that sought to preserve Russian culture from a perceived Masonic/Zionist/Western threat. Dugin was also, however, one of the authors of the original political platform of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation when that party was formed as a successor to the banned Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

…the political program of the Eurasianist Youth Union… can be seen as a short, radical, and fiery expression of Dugin’s thought. The young Eurasianists would establish a new Eurasian empire wherein all cultures would be given the powers of local government to maintain their own laws and enforce their own values. To achieve this, they must fight against primarily the US, against liberals in Russia, and against a host of other enemies including “incompetent bureaucrats” and the “debased media.”

The Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia is perhaps a bit of an odd one out here, with an apparently progressive agenda; however, political divisions are not always clear-cut, and Patriarch Kirill’s eulogy to Hugo Chavez should perhaps be remembered here.

The Union of Orthodox Citizens has also appeared on this blog more than once – there is an overlap with the Association of Orthodox Experts in the person of Kirill Frolov. In 2012 it announced plans to form an Orthodox political party in collaboration with Dmitry Merkulov’s “Tsarist Russia”. According to RIA Novosti (which calls Merkulov’s group “Autocratic Russia”):

The new party will work to reinstate religious instruction in schools and emphasize traditional spiritual, moral and cultural values.

Valentin Lebedev, head of the Union of Orthodox Citizens, said the Russian Orthodox Church is currently under fierce attack because it is “the last pillar of Russian statehood, traditions and culture.”

The Orthodox Action Corporation opposed a gay Christian meeting in St Petersberg in 2011;  The Moscow News reported:

The movement to block the “sodomite meeting” was supported by Orthodox Action Corporation that includes academics and theologists from all over Russia, such as Deacon Andrei Kurayev, head of National Strategy Institute Stanislav Belkovsky and head of the Synodal Department for Church and Society Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate Vsevolo Chaplin.

The Christian Solidarity Foundation is perhaps the local branch of Christian Solidarity International, headed by Dmitry Pakhomov; in August last year he took part in a press conference on Syria, alongside figures that included “Nashi youth movement commissar Konstantin Goloskokov”, and he was a leading voice in the campaign to have members of Pussy Riot imprisoned; Gazeta reported:

The initial response of the church was restrained. However, two days after the incident in the Church of Christ the Savior, a missionary school rector at the Church of St. Thomas, Dmitry Pakhomov, and the co-chairman of Orthodox public movement “People’s Cathedral,” Oleg Kassin, both appealed to the Prosecutor General’s Office. A criminal case was then opened against Pussy Riot for “hooliganism” and the police began a search for the girls.

(I discussed Kassin here)

The Coalition for Morality (or the “Morals Coalition”, or just “For Morality”) is headed by Ivan Dyachenko; in October he led an anti-Pussy Riot protest outside the Moscow City Court while band members were appealing their prison sentences. Dyachenko explained that his fellow protestors were wearing white gowns because they wanted the defendants to be assessed by mental health professionals – a suggestion that of course has a particular resonance in Russian history. He has also complained that their sentence was too short, as “much more time is needed for the convicts to realize their mistake and show repentance”.

The group also gained attention in March, when it complained to the authorities about a newspaper article by Pavel Gusev, head of the Union of Journalists of Moscow. According to Itar-Tass, the group describes itself as “combating the violations of the rights of people and ‘the rights of our children’ and called for the protection of morality and the preservation of the Russian historical and cultural heritage.

Several of the above groups have also come together to form a “Christian Defence” group; according to Pravoslavie:

The association is currently comprised of the Association of Orthodox Experts, the international foundation “Christian Solidarity”, the charitable foundation of Protection of Family, Motherhood and Childhood, the Institute for Demographic Research, and the medical educational center, “Life”.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

From a book review in the National Catholic Register:

Robert Spencer, perhaps the foremost Catholic expert on Islam in our country, has written a new book entitled Not Peace But a Sword: The Great Chasm Between Christianity and Islam (Catholic Answers, 2013). Spencer has advised the highest levels of the military on the Islamic threat to the United States, and has authored several books for the general public on the topic of Islam, including Inside Islam: A Guide for Catholics and Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith.

Spencer’s Catholicism was discussed in February  (he’s a deacon in a Greek Melkite diocese). He has indeed advised “the highest levels of the military”, but so have a number of other problematic individuals. I’ve found Spencer’s polemical comments on the subject of Islam to be slapdash and blustering, rather than what one might expect from “the foremost Catholic expert on Islam” in the USA. When inaccuracies are brought to his attention, he either lashes out with accusations of support for Islamic extremism, or he quietly deletes material from his website without making corrections (see here and here). He also also of course identifies completely Pamela Geller, whose anti-Obama diatribes include birtherism.

The review of Spencer’s book is by “Opus Dei Father C. J. McCloskey”, a man described by the New Republic as “priest to Washington’s conservative establishment” and by Slate as “the Catholic church’s K Street lobbyist”. According to a Beliefnet profile,

McCloskey is credited with facilitating the conversions of such luminaries as failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, “Crossfire” co-host Robert Novak, Republican Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas, conservative book publisher Alfred Regnery, economist and commentator Larry Kudlow, and one-time New York gubernatorial candidate Lewis Lehrman. Abortion doctor-turned-pro-lifer Bernard Nathanson was tutored by McCloskey, as was indicted Tyco International counsel Mark Belnick.

C. John McCloskey is also close to Rick Santorum; some sites further claim that he facilitated Newt Gingrich’s conversion, although McCloskey’s name does not appear in Gingrich’s conversion narrative.

Spencer’s book comes with a designated website, where there are other endorsements: from Scott Hahn of Franciscan University of Steubenville (“shows us how to take Islam seriously without falling into alarmism, hatred, or bigotry”), Patrick Madrid (“calm, lucid, accurate, and uncompromising”), Robert R. Reilly (“his usual clarity and insight”), and William Kilpatrick (“must reading not only for Catholics but for all Christians”).

Spencer’s publisher, Catholic Answers, was founded in 1979, originally to oppose fundamentalist anti-Catholicism.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

Turkish Islamic proselytizer Adnan Oktar (also known as Harun Yahya) continues to fascinate apocalyptically-minded US evangelicals; Bob Unrah writes at WND:

A Turkish television show featured prominent Muslim and Jewish leaders agreeing on the coming end times and declaring an expectation to live in “love, peace, friendship, brotherhood, good faith, kindness.”

The Muslim participants are Oktar Babuna and Adnan Oktar, both prominent Islamic personalities. The Jews are Rabbi Yeshayahu Hollander, a member of the Sanhedrin and an associate justice on the Jerusalem Court for Issues of Bnei Noah, and Rabbi Ben Abrahamson, a historian and consultant at Jerusalem’s Rabbinical Court on matters regarding Islam.

…Walid Shoebat, a former Muslim Brotherhood activist who now is a Christian researching Islam, told WND the encounter “has prophetic significance.”

“Turkey is leading Israel into making a peace treaty, which Isaiah calls ‘a covenant with death’ (Isaiah 28:15) which will happen in Egypt (Isaiah 30:1-2),” he said. “Soon Turkey is likely to confirm the Camp David Accord, which is the main concern for Israel and its neighbor Egypt and if this happens, then we need to be looking upwards, for our redemption draweth nigh…”

Evangelical “Last Days” thinking tends to have it both ways: bellicose anti-Israel rhetoric from countries such as Iran demonstrates that prophesied conflict is inevitable; but more friendly overtures are the harbingers of a “false peace” by which Israel will make an alliance with the anti-Christ before the final conflagration. More on Shoebat – who regularly speaks at churches and conservative events – here and here.

Meanwhile, Oktar has also just had a second meeting with “Glenn Beck’s End Times Prophet” Joel Richardson. Richardson has written books (endorsed by Robert Spencer, among others) claiming that the Bible’s anti-Christ will appear in the form of the Islamic Mahdi, and Richardson seems to think that Oktar may play a special role of some sort here. In a courteous exchange on Oktar’s TV programme, Oktar explained his hope for the rebuilding of the Jewish temple, and that Jews, Christians, and Muslims will make an alliance against “atheists, Darwinists, and materialists”; Richardson talked of friendship, but urged that Oktar and his followers should follow “the Jesus of the Bible as opposed to the false Jesus of the Qur’an”.

The meeting with Sanhedrin representatives took place last November, and followed a previous conversation with other Sanhedrin figures that occurred in 2009. As I noted at the time, the Sanhedrin is self-styled, and has no official standing.

Shoebat also complains:

Whoever imagined that before Jesus’ second coming that Israel must be reestablished with its religious legal institution, the Sanhedrin, the very agency that put him on trial before a Jewish Council. Recently, the Sanhedrin, still, chose someone else besides its rightful Messiah, and have even embraced the Islamic idea, that Messiah could be the Islamic Mahdi.

This negative view of the Sanhedrin contrasts with that of Hal Lindsey, who in 2005 wrote approvingly of how the “religious sages” were talking about the rebuilding of the Temple.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

From the website of magazine and TV show Prophecy in the News:

On July 26-28, 2013 Prophecy in the News will sponsor our 2nd Annual Prophecy Summit. We’ve chosen the spectacular summer weather of Colorado Springs for this annual event and in hindsight, we chose wisely—our event was a complete sell-out in less than 3 weeks! More than 1,100 people will pack out the Marriott Hotel near the US Air Force Academy, but we expect thousands more to join us via a Live Streaming feed, delivered in spectacular HD video. It’s the next best thing to being there in person and whole lot more cost effective!

For $50.00 you can watch all of the presentations in the main auditorium over the 3-day conference period, listening to men like Gary Stearman, Tom Horn, Chuck Missler, LA Marzulli, Mark Biltz, Bob Cornuke, Jonathan Cahn, Bill Koenig, Joseph Farah, Lennart Moller and many others bring you the latest and greatest messages from the world of Bible prophecy, science and archaeology.

In the evangelical “prophecy expert” subculture, fame and success come from the ability to combine strict Biblical literalism with an imaginative and original pet theory. It seems very unlikely that the various “latest and greatest messages” on offer can be synthesized with any coherence; yet the overall effect (here and at other such events) apparently is to reinforce the impression that the Bible is full of supernatural information, rather than to provoke scepticism at the whole industry.

Some names on that list are well-known: Joseph Farah, of course, runs the birther news website WorldNetDaily, and he’s a significant link between conservative evangelicals and the wider conservative movement; Jonathan Cahn’s book The Harbinger has achieved best-selling status, with its claim that significant developments in the USA in recent years – including 9/11 – can be explained by making comparisons with ancient Israel. Other speakers on the list I’ve noted previously include Mark Biltz (Evidence from NASA, combined with a study of the Jewish calendar, suggest that Jesus may return in 2015), Bob Cornuke (found Noah’s Ark in Iran), and (from the full list) Bill Salus (“the world stage is set for the Russian Iranian led coalition of nations”).

However, other speakers on the line-up are more extravagantly speculative and idiosyncratic: in the case of Tom Horn, for instance, the very title of one of his books indicates a somewhat bizarre perspective:  Exo-Vaticana: Petrus Romanus, Project L.U.C.I.F.E.R. and the Vatican’s Astonishing Plan for the Arrival of an Alien Savior (taglines include “The Role of Petrus Romanus for the coming Alien Serpent-Savior”). LA Marzulli, meanwhile (previously discussed here), claims that the famous elongated skulls found in Peru are evidence of the ancient Nephillim.

Prophecy in the News itself promotes some unconventional ideas: its founder, who died in 2011, was a certain JR Church, whose own theory, as expounded in Hidden Prophecies in the Psalms, was that an event in each year of the twentieth century was predicted by a Psalm of the corresponding number (Psalm 1 for 1901, Psalm 2 for 1902, etc). Church’s last book has the title Daniel Reveals the Bloodline of the Antichrist, and it apparently takes in subjects that include: the mountain “where the Nephilim descended to Earth”; “the secrets of Nimrod’s leopard priesthood”; and “one of the greatest cover-ups in Jewish history”, which was when “the rabbis altered the Jewish calendar and eliminated 243 years with the stroke of a pen.”

The organisation is now headed by his former associate, Gary Stearman. Stearman is the author of Time Travelers of the Bible: How Hebrew Prophets Shattered the Barriers of TimeSpace.

(Incidentally, for those who missed it: Chuck Missler recently came to wider attention after he was referenced by Robert Downey Jr in conversation with John Stewart on the Daily Show)

Filed under: Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

From Andy Miller of the Tennessee Freedom Coalition:

Recently I had the pleasure of speaking at an event in Dallas that Frank Gaffney Jr. set up with about 45-50 prominent business leaders about educating and working with State Legislators on issues regarding the Political Nature of Islam. At that event was a Pastor named Rafael Cruz… Yes, Senator Ted Cruz’ Father. After the event he and I talked for close to an hour and a half and he told me that one of if not the most irresponsible and dangerous groups leading folks astray regarding Islam’s Agenda were America’s Clergy. He specifically brought up the “Family of Abraham” Interfaith Events and made it clear to me that when a Pastor or Preacher knows so little about another religion’s tenets or its clearly stated agenda and professes that “We pray to the same God” or that “Allah and God” are one in the same that they are not only leading their flock dangerously astray but are actually delivering them into the hands of Evil…

I’ve written about the Tennessee Freedom Coalition a few times previously: the group held an anti-Islam conference in Nashville in November 2011; the following February, it organised a training session for the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Department. Across the Atlantic, the TFC also supports the English Defence League, and it has made links with the lobby group Christian Concern (details here).

Pastor Rafael Cruz (var. “Pastor Raphael Cruz”), meanwhile, is the director of Purifying Fire Ministries, the narrator of a Spanish audio Bible, and a member of the Tea Party speaker circuit; he left Cuba in 1957 after being imprisoned by the Batista regime. His son Ted Cruz (described in a Star Telegram op-ed ahead of his election as likely to be one of the “most evangelical Republicans ever elected”)  is known for expounding various conspiracy theories, and he recently warned Glenn Beck that Obama may seek to have him (Beck) imprisoned.

Miller’s message is incorporated into a wider notice about a “Family of Abraham” event that was due to take place at Glendale Baptist Church on 20 June. The notice (written beforehand) also explains a plan by Bill Warner, of Political Islam, to attend with fliers entitled “A Voice for the Voiceless” and including the following message:

• We demand a voice for the Kafir political class, particularly in matter of government. This includes education and law enforcement.
• We demand a voice for the martyrs of jihad.
• We demand a voice for those who suffer under political Sharia— apostates, women, artists, gays, free thinkers.
• We demand that those who claim leadership and speak about Islam know the Islamic political doctrine found in the Koran and the Sunna…

Warner was apparently particularly annoyed that scheduled speakers included Blanche Cook, a Federal Prosecutor with the US Attorney General’s office:

This is the second time in two weeks that the DOJ (Department of Justice) has appeared in a Tennessee forum about Islam that does not allow a voice of the victims, reason and knowledge to be heard.

The previous incident refers to the appearance of U.S. Attorney Bill Killian at an event organized by the  American Muslim Advisory Council in Manchester (TN). Killian had been invited to speak following an incident in which local politician Barry West had posted a “joke” photo to his Facebook page encouraging people to point guns at Muslims. The Tennessean reported from what turned out to be a fractious meeting:

People were turned away at the door because the facility was too full. Some grew angry and started hurling terms such as “communist,” “socialist” and “Muslim” at law enforcement officials.

Killian brought a PowerPoint presentation that covered the First and 14th amendments and what constitutes a hate crime, among other things. He read the First Amendment verbatim, between interruptions.

Meanwhile, Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer appeared outside the meeting, warning that Killian’s intention was to “shut down speech deemed ‘inflammatory’ against Muslims”, and that “without freedom of speech peaceful men must resort to violence”.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

From the Daily Mail:

New book reveals how KGB operation seeded Muslim countries with anti-American, anti-Jewish propaganda during the 1970s, laying the groundwork for Islamist terrorism against U.S. and Israel

The highest-ranking Soviet-bloc intelligence officer ever to defect to the West claims in a new book that anti-American Islamic terrorism had its roots in a secret 1970s-era KGB plot to harm but the United States and Israel by seeding Muslim countries with carefully targeted propaganda.

…Those claims come from former Romanian Lt. Gen Ion Mihail Pacepa and University of Mississippi law professor Ronald Rychlak.

…Andropov commissioned the first Arabic translation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian-forged 1905 propaganda book that alleged Jews were plotting to take over Europe – and were being aided by the United States.

…The Protocols book, Pacepa claims, became ‘the basis for much of Hitler’s anti-Semitic philosophy.’ And the KGB, he writes, disseminated ‘thousands of copies’ in Muslim countries during the 1970s.

…Pacepa and Rychlak conclude that much of the anti-American sentiment in the Middle East and elsewhere can be traced back to Soviet clandestine operations, in which he himself played a major role.

Kennedy-era Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s disinformation campaigns ‘widened the gap between Christianity and Judaism,’ according to the authors…

Pacepa famously defected to the USA in 1978; the new claims appear to be an attempt to maintain relevancy through the continued revelation of privileged information that supposedly provides the secret key to understanding world affairs (Reza Kahlili is another example of this tendency). It is the case that the USSR promoted notions of Jewish conspiracy in the wake of the Six Day War, but to see this as the explanation for the existence of “Islamist terrorism” today is to boil down complexity to an absurd degree.

One very obvious alarm bell is that Andropov did not in fact commission “the first Arabic translation” of the the Protocols; the first translation was actually made in the 1920s. According to Binjamin Segel’s A Lie and a Libel: The History of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (p. 62)

In the summer of 1925 a complete Arabic translation appeared in Damascus and immediately achieved wide circulation. The Latin patriarch of Jerusalem made effective propaganda for it throughout the Orient.

Two conservative polemicists concur: Daniel Pipes writes in The Hidden Hand: Middle East Fears of Conspiracy (p. 311):

Christian Palestinians first translated the forgery into Arabic and published it perhaps as early as 1921 and certainly by 1926, followed by many others in subsequent years. Indeed, more translations and editions of The Protocols have appeared in Arabic than in any other language. Leading figures lent their names to editions, including the distinguished Egyptian writer ‘Abbas Mahmud al-‘Aqqad.

While Bat Ye’or adds in Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide (p. 169):

The first Arabic translation of The Protocols from the French edition appeared in the review, Raqib Shayun (15 January 1926), published by the Roman Catholic community of Jerusalem. This propaganda, repeated by the Arab press and  radio, was contested by the Egyptian Jewish community.

Of course, the USSR may indeed have played an active propagandizing role from the late 1960s, as alleged, but if so it was pushing on an open door. The unhappy fact of the popularity of the Protocols in the Arab world cannot be reduced to a plot orchestrated by Yuri Andropov, and much less does this explain Islamic extremism in the twenty-first century.

Pacepa’s claim harks back to an age when “Communist conspiracy” could be trotted out as an explanation for any unwelcome development in politics or society. No need to think about how the west may have helped to give rise to Islamic extremism  (see, for instance, Mark Curtis’s Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam); and no need to think too much about the history of anti-Semitism in the West (or was Henry Ford a Soviet agent?). The claim that the Soviets “widened the gap between Christianity and Judaism” manages to gloss over both Christian anti-Semitism and the differences between Christianity and Judaism (I discussed the latter trend in fundamentalist forms of American Christianity here).

Pacepa and Rychlak’s book is entitled Disinformation, and it is not the first collaboration between the two men: in 2007 Pacepa alleged he had been part of a Soviet plot to smear the memory of Pope Pius XII. That claim is discussed by Zenit here.

UPDATE (11 July): Milking Pacepa’s supposed inside information further, WND now has a follow-up article, on the Vietnam War:

Secretary of State John Kerry’s 1971 testimony before a Senate panel claiming American troops in Vietnam regularly committed war crimes against civilians was a product of a Soviet KGB disinformation campaign, according to the highest-ranking Soviet-bloc defector.

“Although Kerry never fully revealed the source of the accusations, I recognized them as being a product of another KGB disinformation operation,” says Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa in a new documentary produced by WND Films.

…In the new documentary [tie-ing in with the book], retired Lt. Gen. William Boykin, an original member of the U.S. Army’s Delta Force who spent 36 years in the Army, challenges Kerry’s testimony.

“He never saw those things. He was perpetuating the myth of the left about our young men and women who served in Vietnam,” Boykin says.

(more on Boykin’s own extravagant claims here)

This, of course, rakes over old objections made by the Swift Boat Veterans to John Kerry’s “Winter Soldier” investigation.

In 2004, Annenberg Political Factcheck produced a useful round-up and assessment of Kerry’s testimony, which in 1971 Kerry had said was based on statements by “150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans”. Factcheck notes that this evidence did in fact turn out to be problematic: “many of the Winter Soldier participants later refused to speak to investigators for the Naval Investigative Service even though they were assured that they wouldn’t be questioned about atrocities they might have committed personally”, and there is evidence that some of the witnesses had been impostors. We can speculate that some of these impostors may have been working for the KGB, but Pacepa’s vague assertion that he “recognised” disinformation in Kerry’s words is too vague to be helpful.

It’s also worth making a more general point, despite the risk of stating the obvious: evidence in support of a claim may be tainted in any number of ways, but that does not always mean that it should therefore be dismissed out of hand, or that other independent evidence leading in the same direction is also discredited. Of course the USSR would seek to use the Vietnam War to propagandize against the USA, but Factcheck draws attention to plenty of other readily-available and well-known sources of authoritative information showing that war crimes undoubtedly did occur, and that it was these that turned Americans against the war.

Once again, Pacepa’s claim is both reductive of historical complexity and superfluous to historical understanding.

Footnote

The Mail article was written by David Martosko, a controversial figure with a background in corporate PR before being taken on at the Daily Caller (see this profile in Mother Jones). Martosko’s appointment with the Mail earlier this year appears to be part of a strategy to get traffic from US conservative websites; Pacepa and Rychlak’s book is published by WND Books, and the Mail article has received a prominent link from WorldNetDaily.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

As has been widely reported; from the Independent:

Right-wing American speakers planning to join the EDL’s Woolwich march ‘should be banned from entering the country’

The Home Secretary is understood to be considering a request to ban two of the people behind a campaign against New York’s “Ground Zero Mosque” from entering the UK.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 10 Comments »

From Sarah Stern’s Endowment for Middle East Truth:

Rays of Light In the Darkness Dinner
Wednesday June 19, 2013

Washington, DC
EMET is proud to bestow the Speaker of Truth Award to honor a courageous defender of truth, Reza Kahlili, a former CIA operative in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). He is the author of the award-winning book, A Time to Betray.

Bret Stephens will also receive the distinguished Speaker of Truth Award. Mr. Stephens is the Deputy Editor of the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. In addition, Mr. Stephens writes the Journal’s “Global View” column on foreign affairs.

The words “Reza Kahlili” and “Truth” do not fit well together at the best of times; in the context of an “award”, the word  association becomes simply ludicrous.

Kahlili, as I’ve noted previously, writes for WorldNetDaily, and he claims to be the continuing recipient of secret information from inside the regime. However, his claims are so extravagant that Anatoliy Golitsyn would blush: these include the awful disclosures that Iran is in the process of weaponizing smallpox and liaising with al-Qaeda to attack France and Germany.

According to a 2010 Washington Post review of his book, Kahlili did have some association with the CIA while in Iran in the 1980s, but he appears to have exaggerated his significance, and there’s no explanation as to how he continues to receive highly-sensitive information, which he chooses shares with WND rather than a credible news source. However, Kahlili’s stream of revelations has made him a fixture on the Conservative speaker circuit, and the obligatory conversion to Christianity means he now also has a religious audience.

However, Kahlili – who only ever appears in public wearing a medical mask – has declined to accept the award in person; according to an announcement:

The Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET) regrets to announce that due to heightened security concerns, Reza Kahlili – in consultation with EMET – has determined that he will be unable to attend in person to receive his Speaker of the Truth Award at the EMET Rays of Light in the Darkness dinner on June 19th in Washington, D.C.

This unfortunate situation is yet another reminder of the reality of the threat posed by the Iranian regime against those who have the courage speak out against their tyranny.

Naturally, we are not given any actual details of the supposed “heightened security concerns”

Filed under: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

From LifeSiteNews:

The founder of Estonia’s pro-family movement said in an interview with a Polish Catholic television program that the country’s draft law on same-sex marriage will not go forward after his group presented the government with nearly 40,000 signatures defending traditional marriage. Law professor Varro Vooglaid told Polonia Christiana that presentation of the petition from the Estonian Foundation for Defense of Tradition and Family will not allow the homosexualist ideologues to frame the issue in terms of “human rights”.

According to a report from the site from last month:

Spokesman for the Estonian Foundation for Defense of Family and Tradition, Slawomir Olejniczak, told LifeSiteNews that the petition campaign was the largest and most successful collection of signatures ever carried out in the country of 580,000 households against a proposed change of law.

Petition forms were apparently mailed out to the households.

Olejniczak is Polish rather than Estonian, and he previously organised a direct mail campaign in Poland. Morton Blackwell’s Leadership Institute (previously blogged by me here) has a profile:

Mr. Olejniczak met TFP bureau in Krakow in 1995 and he started collaboration with the organization one year later. He is one of the founders of two TFP affiliated organizations in Poland. First one was created in 1999 and its name is the Association for Christian Culture of Fr. Peter Skarga [Stowarzyszenie Kultury Chrze?cija?skiej im. ks. Piotra Skargi]. The second organization was founded in 2001 and it is a foundation called the Institute for Social and Religious Education of Fr. Peter Skarga. He is also a President of the Board of Directors for both entities which have become main conservative Catholic movement in the country.

Under his presidency the organizations apart from their public activities started fundraising campaigns in 2001 and after eight years they have achieved over 200.000 donors. In 2005 the Association of Fr. Peter Skarga organized by direct mail a successful protest campaign against legal recognition of  homosexual unions.

“TFP” is “Tradition, Family, and Property”, a well-known right-wing Catholic group that operates in a number of countries – I discussed some of its activities here. The American TFP site has a 2005 piece by Olejniczak here.

Varro Vooglaid, meanwhile, co-directs “Fundamental Rights Protection Centre” (Põhiõiguste Kaitse Keskus), although it doesn’t appear to be very active; he is also a partner in Ignatius, a  Catholic law firm founded by the organisation’s co-founder, Erik Salumäe.

A profile of Vooglaid from Ekspress can be seen here; it includes the detail that he is the son of Ülo Vooglaid, a sociologist; in the 1960s, Ülo Vooglaid founded a Laboratory of Sociology that was closed down by Soviet authorities. A 2004 interview here shows him fulminating about “deviant behaviour”; more recently, a piece in Delfi quotes him warning about European elites and local collaborators supporting “pederastide” (1).

Note

(1) A Russian translation of the same article has “?????????”. The Oxford Russian-English Dictionary translates this as “p(a)ederast, sodomite”, and it appears from Google Translate that the Estonian language has the same conflation of concepts. So, it’s not clear what exactly Ülo Vooglaid means here.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

Typically extravagant claims from Todd Bentley, as he recalls a visit to Uganda in 2002 in a new message to supporters:

…They brought a woman that had been to all the witch doctors and all the magic soothsayers and whatever she could do to get healed because she had breast cancer… As she was standing in the crowd, the power of God came all over her and she grew a brand new breast… Right after that, they brought two more people onto the platform. The woman was born without the parts that a woman needs, and the man as well because of a cancerous tumor. Both of them were instantly healed.

…I started to break the power of witchcraft, and 1,835 people at the same time started manifesting demons and fell to the ground writhing like snakes. We counted 1,835 people vomiting, rolling in the mud, writhing and hissing on the ground like snakes. There were even people levitating off of the ground by the power of witchcraft, even a young boy.

Bentley’s visit occurred before he had become generally (in)famous, but his reputation as an “international evangelist” was on the rise: he had been profiled in Charisma magazine, and the visit was noted in local media; the Monitor reported:

Todd will hold a huge five-day crusade starting on November 6th at Main Street primary School grounds in Jinja, every afternoon.

…Pastor Gerald Mwebe of Streams of Life church, Kampala, FFM Coordinator in Africa says Todd will leave some of himself behind in the form of a School of Ministry. Fresh Fire School of Ministry, opening on Tuesday, November 5th, 2002 in Mukono, will train pastors from all over East Africa and ensure that other people can tap some of Todd’s anointing and follow in his footsteps.

Jinja was also chosen because it has been a traditionally hard place for the gospel to breakthrough. Reinhard Bonnke had his crusade stopped in 1990. Prayer Palace founder, Apostle Deo Balabyekubo died in a grisly motor accident while on his way to organise a crusade in Jinja. Todd’s crusade therefore is also an act of defiance against what Christians say the devil has done in Jinja.

Bentley also mentions Bonnke in his new message:

I’ve talked face to face with Reinhard about the story because I told him I preached in Jinja, Uganda, and I need you to tell me the story. He said, “It was the only time I was ever driven out of a city and I said I would never go back.”

Just like the disciples, you know if they don’t receive you and honor you, the Bible says, “Dust off the feet and just walk out.” Reinhard said it was the only time, “When I stepped out of Jinja, I dusted my feet off and I said, I’ll never come back to Jinja.” Well, a curse came over the city for many years-nobody was getting saved, nobody was getting healed, and nobody was getting delivered.

Bonnke’s visit took place in 1990; according to Colin Whittaker’s biography (which, incidentally, notes that Christine Darg was there as a member of his team), his campaign in the town was cancelled by armed police on its third night at the behest of the local District Commissioner, who overruled permit papers issued in Kampala:

Reinhard shook the dust from his feet and flew to Nairobi. He said he would have been willing to return to continue the event, but ‘The Holy Spirit told me not to trust the permit paper’.

“Shaking the dust from the feet” of course is a Biblical sign of rejection, and the notion apparently spread in Uganda that Jinja had come under a curse. This blog cites a magazine called The Evangelist:

God swung into wrath as his servant moved down the pulpit and descended a curse over the land.  As Bonnke removed his coat, He said, “Jinja is cursed”.

 
Indeed it was confirmed from above and horror fell on Jinja as one observer who preferred not to be named in this article , narrated how Jinja faced God’s wrath.  “A town that was the second developed after Kampala, lost its glory instantly, said the observer. It spread to the whole area, the town and its surrounding areas were attacked by jiggers, to an extent that even the elderly fell victims…”

This was written as Bonnke finally returned to the town, in June 2012. The Kampala Observer reported:

Filed under: Uncategorized | 6 Comments »