What has happened to Amina?

Amina is the young Syrian woman who was threatened with rape by Islamist thugs. She disappeared a few days ago.

Earlier today, at approximately 6:00 pm Damascus time, Amina was walking in the area of the Abbasid bus station, near Fares al Khouri Street. She had gone to meet a person involved with the Local Coordinating Committee and was accompanied by a friend.

Amina told the friend that she would go ahead and they were separated. Amina had, apparently, identified the person she was to meet. However, while her companion was still close by, Amina was seized by three men in their early 20’s. According to the witness (who does not want her identity known), the men were armed. Amina hit one of them and told the friend to go find her father.

One of the men then put his hand over Amina’s mouth and they hustled her into a red Dacia Logan with a window sticker of Basel Assad. The witness did not get the tag number. She promptly went and found Amina’s father.

The men are assumed to be members of one of the security services or the Baath Party militia. Amina’s present location is unknown and it is unclear if she is in a jail or being held elsewhere in Damascus.

This is the world we live in, that such nightmares can occur. There has been one update, but no encouraging words: keep an eye on her blog for any news.

Evolution is a Jewish conspiracy

The essay starts off stupidly enough.

In 1867 Karl Marx dedicated DasKapital to Charles Darwin.

Actually, no, he didn’t. It’s a fairly common lie in creationist circles, though, just like the others sprinkled throughout the story.

Modern creation science is led by an array of top-flight Ph.D. scientists, including biochemists, paleontologists, astronomers and geologists. It presents a formidable battery of evidence now knocking hundreds of holes in traditional evolutionary arguments. As never before, scientific creationism debunks the contrived “evidence” that evolutionary theory has fed on since Darwin.

No, it isn’t. Creation science is led by a gang of ignorant clods who can’t read a paper without mangling it.

But OK, so far this is just your standard modus operandi for creationists. The really weird stuff is shouted out in the title: JEWISH SUPREMACISTS USE EVOLUTION TO CORRUPT MANKIND. Did you know that evolution is a Jewish conspiracy to corrupt Western civilization?

Why doesn’t the scientific community abandon Darwin’s failed hypotheses? Simple: The Jewish-dominated media and educational establishment are determined that, like unconditional support of Israel, Holocaust mythology, hate laws, and “civil rights” favoritism, there will be no end to the relentless force-feeding of evolution. Belief in evolution is a prerequisite for Jewish supremacism’s new-world order.

Yet anti-Zionist leadership on the right remains oblivious to the fact that evolution is the largest, ugliest, most aggressive tentacle of the Jewish revolutionary octopus. Anti-Zionists are often evolutionists, claiming that Jews evolved in a way that makes them inherently degenerate, subversive, and corruptive. They make the most Luciferian, dehumanizing fable ever invented by pseudo-science into a pillar of their thinking!

The Reverend Ted Pike is kind of obsessed with Jews. They’re behind everything.

You see, the degenerate Jews promote evolution, which led the Nazis to kill Jews, and we must organize resistance to the Jewish agenda and the Judaic threat, and we absolutely must support Israel without question. Every paragraph drips with anti-semitic bigotry, but at the same time he rants against the wicked anti-Zionists.

I’ve seen this often in fundamentalist Christians. Jews aren’t really people; they’re just props in the script of their eschatology. We have to keep them around because the True Final Solution is for Jesus to exterminate most of them and convert the survivors, and if we jump the gun and kill them all now, why, that would invalidate the Bible, which would be wicked.

The problem we face today originates in Jewish rebellion to Christ. It is primarily a moral issue which cannot be addressed by dehumanizing Jews or violence. It must be met with reason and persuasion, even love. The Bible presents Jewish apostasy as part of a long-range scenario that will ultimately result in anti-Christ world rule but also redemption of a remnant of Jews out of great tribulation at Christ’s second coming. The problem of Jewish supremacism ultimately is Christ’s problem, to be resolved by Him, not military or persecutive measures.

This is why Adolf Hitler and the Nazis must be damned. Not because they killed people, but because they lead us into “anti-biblical, evolutionary, racist errors”. We must support Israel because it’s a kind of holding pen for the Jews, where they will be annihilated in Armageddon, and you’re a bad, bad person if you begin the slaughter prematurely.

Despite the fact that I don’t have any evidence of any Jewish background in my lineage, I do have to cop to being an ugly evolutionary tentacle, and there are most certainly Jews in my readership. Does it make you feel all warm and happy and safe to peek into the minds of some of the most ardent Christian supporters of Israel?

“He was really a nice guy. He went to church and everything.”

Those are ominous words. Brian and Shannon Gore have been arrested after police, investigating evidence that Shannon Gore had been selling stolen goods, found their 5 or 6 year old daughter caged in their trailer home, gnawing on her own skin.

Then they found the body of another child buried under a shed.

Fine upstanding members of the Christian community, they are.

I don’t consider every Christian to be a child-torturing murderer, but one thing I wish we could get across is that church attendance has nothing to do with morality or ethical behavior or goodness of any kind. So why do so many people consider a weekly session with a deranged, delusional ranter in a pulpit to be a seal of approval?

Tragedy in Brazil

Another madman has run wild, this time in Brazil, killing 11 schoolchildren and wounding another 13 before killing himself (and here’s the story in Portuguese, with many photos, including a few that are grislier than you’ll see in the US media). The killer left a suicide note, and a Brazilian reader sent me his translation:

First of all you should know that the impure can’t touch me without
gloves, only the chaste or the the ones that lost their chastity after their
marriages and haven’t been adulterous may touch me with no gloves,
i.e., no fornicator or adulterer may have direct contact with me, nor anything
impure touch my blood, no impure may have direct contact with a virgin
without permission, those that take care of my burial should take off all
my clothes, bathe me, dry me and wrap me while totally naked in a white cloth
which is in this building, in a bag I left in the first room of the first floor, after
wrapping me in this cloth you may put me in my coffin. If possible, I’d like
to be buried next to the grave where my mother sleeps, my mother is
called Dicéa Menezes de Oliveira and is buried in the Murundu cemetery.
I need the visit of a faithfull follower of God in my tomb at least once,
I need him to pray in front of it asking for God’s forgiveness for
what I did asking that when Jesus comes he will wake me up from the
sleep of death to life.

At least this savagery won’t be pinned on atheists, not this time. I don’t think we can blame religion, either, although his insanity clearly found expression in religious idiom — this guy was just malignantly deranged.

I hope no one is respecting the killer’s final wishes, and that his corpse is treated like dead rotting meat, nothing more, and buried with exactly the same treatment anyone else’s body would receive. And then may his name be forgotten.

A death in Uganda

Uganda is currently undergoing conflict over civil rights: a number of influential Christians in the country, under the influence of American evangelicals like Scott Lively and Rick Warren, have been pushing to have homosexuality condemned and people who love other people of the same sex arrested or executed. It’s an ugly place where the dreams of the Christian right are actually being realized, but of course our evangelical leaders are denying their responsibility. Just last night on CNN I caught a bit of a nauseating interview with Joel Osteen, the smirking prosperity gospel pitchman, and he came right out and smilingly declared homosexuality a sin…but his wife just loves Elton John, so it’s all OK. Rick Warren is also similarly a moral coward who will happily trigger the landslide, but refuses to involve himself in the consequences.

But Warren won’t go so far as to condemn the legislation itself. A request for a broader reaction to the proposed Ugandan anti-homosexual laws generated this response: “The fundamental dignity of every person, our right to be free, and the freedom to make moral choices are gifts endowed by God, our creator. However, it is not my personal calling as a pastor in America to comment or interfere in the political process of other nations.” On Meet the Press this morning, he reiterated this neutral stance in a different context: “As a pastor, my job is to encourage, to support. I never take sides.” Warren did say he believed that abortion was “a holocaust.” He knows as well as anyone that in a case of great wrong, taking sides is an important thing to do.

Our good, kind, sinner-loving, sin-hating Christianist monsters have more blood on their hands now. David Kato, a Ugandan civil rights leader who fought for tolerance for gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered people, has been beaten to death. This event followed after many death threats, and after the publication of a hit list in a local magazine.

The fight against the bill has also pushed Ugandan activists to the fore, raising concern for their privacy and safety. These deepened in late 2010 when a local tabloid called Rolling Stone, unconnected to the US magazine, published pictures, names, and residence locations of some members of the LGBT community, along with a headline saying, “Hang Them.” Kato’s photo appeared on the cover, and inside another photo appeared with his name.

Couple religious certainty and an atmosphere in which religious leaders are assuring everyone that certain people are less than human, damned, or criminal, and this is what you get: vigilante injustice. And Uganda loses another force for justice and humanity.

This is not a case about abortion

I have been receiving lots of triumphant mail from anti-choice people claiming vindication, that abortion is wrong, and demanding to know how I can possibly support abortion rights after hearing about the case of Dr Kermit Gosnell. Gosnell ran an abortion mill in Philadelphia, and was a hack who maimed and killed women while doing abortions on demand, for a substantial fee. He was unqualified, uncertified in obstetrics and gynecology, and his facility was unmonitored and relatively uninspected. He gave untrained, inexperienced staff critical jobs in the surgery — he allowed a 15 year old high school student to handle anesthesia. He killed a patient by overdosing her on drugs, and is also charged with killing 7 babies in late-term abortions.

Gosnell is precisely the kind of butcher the pro-choice movement opposes. No one endorses bad medicine and unrestricted, unregulated, cowboy surgery like Gosnell practiced — what he represents is the kind of back-alley deadly hackery that the anti-choice movement would have as the only possible recourse, if they had their way. If anything, the Gosnell case is an argument for legal abortion.

It is entirely appropriate that this monster be shut down and charged with serious crimes against women. This isn’t the first death for which he’s responsible; another woman died of a perforated uterus, others suffered from punctured internal organs, others were left sterile by his botched work. The most shocking news is that this guy has been chopping up poor women since 1979, and that the last time the state actually inspected his facilities was in 1993. Why have people looked the other way and allowed this to continue for 30 years?

He has also been charged with the murders of seven babies, and there I have to disagree. There has to be a difference in degree, or the mothers of those infants would also have to be charged as collaborators (they were all willing volunteers for this medical procedure, and they knew the result would be termination of their pregnancy). They haven’t, and they shouldn’t. Much noise is being made about the “horrific” killings, but late term abortions, even the ones done in clean, properly maintained facilities with well-trained personnel, are always necessarily bloody and unpleasant affairs, like most surgeries. The important word there is “necessary”. Late term abortions should be carried out when it is essential for the life and health of the woman, who is the most important participant in these circumstances, and opening the door to accusing doctors who perform necessary operations as murder is a dangerous precedent.

Gosnell committed many crimes. He posed as a qualified practitioner of his art, when he wasn’t. He did not maintain a medical facility in an appropriate manner. He had even less qualified people do life-threatening work. He lied to women about their pregnancies. He mutilated and killed women. He did harm. That should be what generates public outrage, not the fact that he did abortions.

It wasn’t just shoddy, it was fraud

The infamous Andrew Wakefield study that claimed to find a link between autism and vaccinations is still being scrutinized, and the latest investigation has uncovered evidence of faked data.

A new examination found, by comparing the reported diagnoses in the paper to hospital records, that Wakefield and colleagues altered facts about patients in their study.

The analysis, by British journalist Brian Deer, found that despite the claim in Wakefield’s paper that the 12 children studied were normal until they had the MMR shot, five had previously documented developmental problems. Deer also found that all the cases were somehow misrepresented when he compared data from medical records and the children’s parents.

Children died because of the hysteria fomented by the contemptible Wakefield. How does that guy live with himself?

Here’s how: he’s in denial. Watch Anderson Cooper call an apoplectic Wakefield a liar.

Antisemitism still thrives

This is a very grim video; the myth of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion still lives on Muslim television. When it starts, you might be able to laugh a bit — did you know the Jews drain the blood of young boys to make matzoh balls? — but by the end, where some evil cleric is gloating over old footage of dead and dying Jews in Nazi prison camps (“look at the corpses, Allah be praised!”) and that he hopes the followers of Allah will be the next to carry out this holy work, I give you fair warning that you might well be too sickened to continue.

New Trends in Arabic Anti-semitism from Henrik Clausen on Vimeo.

I’m not a fan of Israel’s policies — they’re becoming what they oppose — but there’s clearly no possibility that they could simply stop fighting for their existence and live in peace and tolerance with neighbors who promote the kind of hate shown above.

From Nunavut to Lourdes

Eric Dejaeger is a Catholic priest and pedophile who benefited greatly from church policy: when it was learned that he was a child-raping monster, the Catholic Church did the upright, moral thing and kept him on as a priest, but simply shipped him off to the Canadian north where he’d only be raping the Inuit. When the law caught up with him even in that remote place, he fled…and guess where he found shelter and employment? Back in the arms of Mother Church, of course.

The Belgian-born priest, who became a Canadian citizen in 1977, is wanted for three counts of indecent assault on a male and three counts of buggery for incidents involving minors and alleged to have occurred between 1978 and 1982 in Igloolik. These charges were laid after he completed a five-year sentence in April of 1995 (a penitentiary stint, a halfway house then probation) for abusing children in Baker Lake, then part of the Northwest Territories, now part of Nunavut. Dejaeger left Canada before his first court date in June of 1995 and a bench warrant was issued for his arrest.

Six years later, the Interpol red alert was circulated. Nine years after that, in May of this year, Belgian journalist Douglas De Coninck published an article detailing Dejaeger’s life on the lam. The priest worked with pilgrims in Lourdes and participated in masses. A member of the Oblate Order of Mary Immaculate, he was living at the order’s villa in Blanden. Several months after the article appeared, Dejaeger voluntarily turned himself in at the Leuven police station.

Unfortunately, the Belgian police just turned him loose again, stating that there was no extradition order from Canada. He’s on the run again. Given his history, I can guess where we’ll find him: turn over a few churches, and he’ll be found nestling amongst the friendly priests.

But let’s not just blame religion! There’s also another nasty story here, of secular authorities turning a blind eye to his activities. He’d been brought before a Canadian judge who didn’t seem to think Dejaeger was such a bad fellow.

Oddly, Justice Ted Richard of the Northwest Territories Supreme Court wrote in his sentence decision that Dejaeger was not a pedophile even though “it does not appear that he stopped this activity on his own but only when he was caught.” It’s unclear how he was caught.

Dejaeger admitted to, among other sexual acts, having anal intercourse with boys and digital vaginal penetration with girls. Yet Richard seemed to praise the priest’s restraint:

“Because of the age of the victims of these assaults, consent is not an issue or a factor to be considered. However, it should be noted in fairness to the offender here that no violence was used in committing these assaults,” Richard wrote 20 years ago.

Priests don’t use violence, usually. They’ve got the shackles of tradition and dogma to hold their victims down for them.

And of course the real crime here is that these monsters in dog collars were dumped on the native peoples of Canada to rip their way through several generations, and there is no sign of remorse for that from the Vatican.

6 August 1945

History is not going to judge us kindly for this crime against humanity. Never again.

hiroshima.jpeg

In the following waves [after the initial blast] people’s bodies were terribly squeezed, then their internal organs ruptured. Then the blast blew the broken bodies at 500 to 1,000 miles per hour through the flaming, rubble-filled air. Practically everybody within a radius of 6,500 feet was killed or seriously injured and all buildings crushed or disemboweled.

Japanese doctors said that those who had been killed by the blast itself died instantly. But presently, according to these doctors, those who had suffered only small burns found their appetite failing, their hair falling out, their gums bleeding. They developed temperatures of 104, vomited blood, and died. It was discovered that they had lost 86 percent of their white blood corpuscles. Last week the Japanese announced that the count of Hiroshima’s dead had risen to 125,000.

I am completely unswayed by the argument that the bombing saved American lives by convincing the Japanese that their cause was hopeless. If that were true, why not bomb a nearby deserted atoll as a demonstration? Why bomb two cities over the course of several days? Why not pick a military target rather than a civilian center? This was an act of callous terrorism.

Still arguing? Go watch this fabulous dialog between AC Grayling and Christopher Hitchens, discussing Grayling’s book, Among the Dead Cities. Grayling makes the same argument I do, that the bombing of civilians was immoral and to little material effect. The surprising thing, though, is that I expected Hitchens to go all militaristic, but he doesn’t; he actually deplores the area bombing campaign. He draws a stronger conclusion — he thinks the complete and unambiguous defeat of Nazi Germany was necessary to allow rebuilding of the country, but he thinks the attempts to destroy the German culture with devastating firebombing was not a rightful act.