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Trick or treat? I don't know about you, but my answer to this question, if I'm honest, would be unprintable in a family newspaper. Let's say it's stronger than 'push off'. Yet the little beggars will soon be round, banging and ringing at our doors with this irritating refrain. My own youngest child, and my grandchildren, are among these public nuisances. It would seem churlish to stop them. All their friends do it.
They have been looking forward to Halloween for weeks, planning their ghoulish costumes and their weird face paints, and deciding which streets will contain the richest pickings: that is,. the largest number of grown-up mugs who will be waiting by their front doors with tooth-rotting sweets to give them.
Why will the grown-ups be so gener-ous? Because it is the children's birthday, or Christmas? No. Simply because the little bleeders demanded a 'treat'. For several weeks now, the shelves in my local Woolworths have been arrayed with miniature outfits. Dwarfish witch-hats, tiny little vam-pire costumes and wizards' robes in garish artificial fibres hang in long rows, while on an opposite shelf, in the shape of skulls, werewolf faces, pumpkins and black cats, are the tra-ditional plastic Trick Or Treat bags.
Some of these are of modest pro-portion. Some are large enough to carry home a weekly shop from a supermarket.
But, you will argue before I become too solemn about the whole business, surely it's only a bit of fun? What's the difference between modern children making Trick Or Treat excursions, and an older generation trundling an old pram round the pavements, containing Grandad's worn-out Suit, stuffed with pillows or straw, and labelled Penny For The Guy?
One answer is that, in the past, the fun of special days in our calendar was enhanced, and their nuisance value reduced, by everyone keeping to the day itself. Christmas happened just at Christmas. It did not begin in the big department stores in September.
Halloween - All Saints Eve - was a religious festival that took place on October 31. And Guy Fawkes, of course, used to take place on Nov-ember 5.
But now, the approach of autumn in any of our big towns is the signal for a nondescript period lasting weeks in which the kids are at large on the streets, letting off fireworks and doing what, at other times and in other age groups, would be criminal - turning up on our doorsteps and demanding we give them something for nothing.
In today's climate, with its disdain for- history and the calendar, our spoilt modem kids have been popping and spluttering fireworks and frightening the cat for well over a month now. It suits the multiculturalists in our midst very well.
Recently I remarked how sad it was to have fireworks any old night rather than waiting until Guy Fawkes Day. An earnest Seven-year-old of the party, neither a Hindu nor of Asian background, corrected me and said: 'They aren't for Guy Fawkes, they're for Diwali, the Festival of Light.'
But the fireworks aren't for Diwali, any more than they are to commemo-rate an incident in English history which has long been expunged from the National Curriculum.
To my mind, the pops and bangs are in fact the distant sounds of battle, and it is a battle we are losing. They may only sound like fireworks, but they are the whiff of grapeshot in the Kiddy Revolution. They are one of the small signs in our society that the grown-ups have given up trying to be the ones in charge.
When I think about the approach of Halloween, for example, I am actually a bit ashamed that I allow my child to indulge in its modem manifestation.
Not because I think there is anything wrong in going round pretending to be a vampire or a werewolf, but because our contemporary way of observing this ancient festival exemplifies in a small way so much that is horrible, if not downright sick, about our attitude to material possessions in modern Britain.
Let's deal with the claim that Hal-loween is a good old English tradition. This is true, and from its name you can tell how old, and how English it is. Not All Saints Eve, which means the same thing, but All Hallows, the Anglo-Saxon word for the saints.
The night before All Saints' Day (November 1), and two days before the day when Catholics remember All Souls (November 2) - that is, the dead who might or might not have yet made it into Heaven - was a tradi-tional time for thinking about the deceased and about the various spirits, demons, ghoulies and ghosties who were thought to hover around in the atmosphere.
Before the Church celebrated All Saints, it was supposed that those who were on the side of darkness, the witches, and the evil spirits they conjured up, had one last runabout before being confined to their hellish home.
Most of these ideas were rejected by the Protestant Reformation. So Halloween, in Protestant Britain, became little more than a folk memory for hundreds of years.
You might cut out a pumpkin in the shape of a mask and light a can-dle in it. And children traditionally, on this day when most of the apples had been gathered in from orchards, would indulge in the amusing and difficult game of 'bobbing' - that is, trying to pick up apples with their teeth from a floating surface of water, usually a barrel.
The modern cult of Halloween -with garish costumes, ghost-masks and the deplorable Trick Or Treat - is an American concoction. It stems not from the ancient folk cus-toms of the countryside, and not from the liturgy of the medieval Church, but from the kitsch hotch-potch known as American Gothic.
Jokey horror films about Dracula, TV comedies such as The Munsters and Bewitched! fed the modern Halloween idea, which actually has no traditional content at all, no meaning, and no connection with -any particular set of beliefs.
It is wrong to be too po-faced about it. If children enjoy the Amer-ican Gothic kitsch side of the festivities, as they plainly do, then it seems churlish to stop them having their Halloween parties, in which the white sandwiches have been ingeniously cut in the shape of ghosts and the cakes have been cleverly adorned with liquorice, or splashed with red cochineal to simulate blackness, and gore.
There can be something beguiling about a six-year old girl with bright green face paint and a tall witch's hat.
But it is not in the least beguiling to teach them that they should go round disturbing the neighbours, waking their dogs and babies, and stridently demanding sweets, or punishing us with tricks if they fail to get grown-ups to provide them with sweets, or even to open the front door on, demand.
In my part of London, as the evening wears on, a nastier type of Trick Or Treater comes round. Last year, 12 to 15-year-olds demanded not sweets but money, and when told to get lost, they returned with rotten eggs. We were lucky. Some houses got their windows smashed. The criminality of these older children can be blamed on the odious Trick Or Treat idea.
Already our young are more indulged than any generation in history. It is forbidden by law to hit them. Probably that is a good thing, but the consequence of the over-whelming emphasis on children's rights has been that many schools have become No Go areas for teachers.
Even so-called 'nice' children are likely to regard any check on their behaviour by grown-ups as unacceptable. And they are seen, from the earliest age, as the ones who dictate the terms with their parents, teachers and elders.
In the current social climate, when children get away with any' kind of behaviour unchecked, Trick Or Treat does not seem like one silly little phrase uttered once a year. It actually seems like the motto of an entire generation.
Gone are the days when treats were a rarity. Children now expect to be amused and treated and entertained every minute of the day - at amusement parks, with video games, with computers and television.
But what has made this so much worse is a combination of political correctness and the health and safety inspectorate ~ which have together conspired to hand ultimate victory to the kiddy revolution.
In today's climate, rather than being encouraged to 'Remember, remember the fifth of November: Gunpowder, treason and plot', the authorities would far rather we forgot it altogether, certainly as far as its history is concerned.
Much better to avoid any poten-tial offence to Roman Catholics, or to loyal supporters of the Lady Ara-bella Stuart Appreciation Society (it was Lady Arabella who would have been made Queen had the terrorists on November 5,1605, been successful in blowing the King, Lords and Commons sky high).
Two years ago, on the 400th anniversary of the gunpowder plot, fireworks were banned from commemorations in Westminster because loud bangs were thought inappropriate with Islamic terror-ists about.
This year, sparklers have been banned in Manchester and Health and Safety officials have seen off a bonfire in Watford on the pathetic grounds that there would be a danger of smoke inhalation.
Only in Lewes, Sussex, where the traditional Guy Fawkes Day is kept in high style, with processions, flaming torches, and an effigy burnt on the bonfire, can .the reckless youth enjoy part of the essence of the celebration -namely its danger. (We are, after all, commemorating a terrorist threat that could have obliterated Parliament.)
By the time the evening round the bonfires in Lewes has quietened, the streets are alive to the sound of bangers, which the boys throw into spontaneously-lit fires.
There is something primitive, and innocent, about the Lewes celebra-tions. In the morning, they are all over. And everyone has taken part in a genuine calendar festival. But in other towns, it is all a bit different.
Because no one is encouraged to celebrate properly with a guy and its Popish significance, to learn what Bonfire Night and November 5 is all about, we have an amorphous mess of fireworks, Trick Or Treats, Diwali and children roam-ing the streets, which stretches over days and weeks.
And that is why the children have won, because autumn is now a time for them to get back to the serious business of being over-indulged and creating a nuisance with their bangs and Trick Or Treat demands on the doorstep.
Anyone who questions this unending indulgence is thought to be a throwback to some supposed bad old days. The useful word 'No' is unheard in many households today, especially in those where the parents, feeling guilty about having separated or divorced or worked for too many hours in the week, over-indulge their children to show that they still love them.
But over-indulgence is not love. It is a form of carelessness. It is a way of creating moral neuters. Like older people, children respond to the idea that reward comes for good done, not simply because it is demanded.
The Trick Or Treat craze is black-mail from a generation of spoilt brats who know nothing about their past and get treats every week of the year. They won't thank us when they've grown up.
http://counterpunch.org/tariq09162006.html
http://www.palestinechronicle.com/story-09180660112.htm
By Tariq Ali - CounterPunch.org
Was Benedict's most recent provocation accidental or deliberate? The Bavarian is a razor-sharp reactionary cleric. A man who organises his own succession to the Papacy with a ruthless purge of potential dissidents and supervises the selection of Cardinals with great care leaves little to chance.
I think he knew what he was saying and why.
Choosing a quote from Manuel II Paleologos, not the most intelligent of the Byzantine rulers, was somewhat disingenuous, especially on the eve of a visit to Turkey. He could have found more effective quotes and closer to home. Perhaps it was his unique tribute to Oriana Fallaci.
Perhaps.
The Muslim world with two of its countries---Iraq and Afghanistan-- directly occupied by Western troops does not need to be reminded of the language of the Crusades. In a neo-liberal world suffering from environmental degradation, poverty, hunger, repression, a 'planet of slums' (in the graphic phrase of Mike Davis), the Pope chooses to insult the founder of a rival faith.
The reaction in the Muslim world was predictable, but depressingly insufficient. Islamic civilization cannot be reduced to the power of the sword. It was the vital bridge between the Ancient world and the European Renaissance. It was the Catholic Church that declared War on Islam in the Iberian Peninsula and Sicily. Mass expulsions, killings, forced conversions and a vicious Inquisition to police the cleansed Europe and the reformist Protestant enemy.
The fury against 'heretics' led to the burning of Cathar villages in Southern France. Jews and Protestants alike were granted refuge by the Ottoman Empire, a refuge they would have been denied had Istanbul remained Constantinople. 'Slaves, obey your human masters. For Christ is the real master you serve' said Paul (Colossians 3: 22-24) in establishing a collaborationist tradition which fell on its knees before wealth and power and which reached its apogee during the Second World War where the leadership of the Church collaborated with fascism and did not speak up against the judeocide or the butchery on the Eastern Front. Islam does not need pacifist lessons from this Church.
Violence was and is not the prerogative of any single religion as the continuing Israeli occupation of Palestine demonstrates. During the Cold War the Vatican, with rare exceptions, supported the imperial wars. Both sides were blessed during the First and Second World wars; the US Cardinal Spellman was a leading warrior in the battles to destroy Communism during the Korean and Vietnam wars. The Vatican later punished the liberation theologists and peasant-priests in Latin America. Some were excommunicated.
Not all Christians joined in the crusades old and new. When Pope Urban launched the crusades the Norman king of Sicily refused to send troops in which Sicilian Muslims would be compelled to fight against Muslims in the East. His son, Roger II, refused to back the Second Crusade. In doing so they showed more courage than the leaders of contemporary Italy, who are only too willing to join the imperial crusades against the Muslim world.
'To make sure of being right in all things', said the founder of the Jesuits, Ignatius Loyola, 'we ought always to hold to the principle that the white I see I should believe to be black if the hierarchical church were so to rule.'
Today most Catholic prelates in the West (including the Bavarian in the Vatican) and politicians of Centre-Left/Right worship the real Pope who lives in the White House and tells them when black is white.
Amen.
-Tariq Ali is author of the recently released Street Fighting Years (new edition) and, with David Barsamian, Speaking of Empires & Resistance. He can be reached at: tariq.ali3(at)btinternet.com
http://www.palestinechronicle.com/story-09180660112.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/pope/story/0,,1874853,00.html
While some welcome gesture, others demand act of contrition
Luke Harding in Berlin and Hugh Muir
Monday September 18, 2006
Guardian
Pope Benedict's admission that he was "deeply sorry" for offending the sensitivities of Muslims does not necessarily mean that the worst crisis of his papacy is over yet. Speaking in Rome yesterday, the Pope said that the views of the 14th-century Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaeologus that he quoted last week - describing Islam as "evil and inhuman" - were not his own.
In Britain, some senior Muslims welcomed the Pope's apologies but suggested that he would have to make a further apology to stop the row escalating.
Massoud Shadjareh, of the Islamic Human Rights Commission, said: "He needs to convince that this is a genuine apology because many people are aware of the sort of things he has been saying for a long time. Threats are not the way forward but some of the things he has said have been music to the ears of racists."
The Muslim Council of Britain welcomed the Pope's explanation. A spokesman said: "We very much welcome the Pope's statement today in which he made it clear that his own views do not in any way accord with those of the 14th century emperor. This is a very important clarification that we had been seeking. Had this caveat been included in the Pope's original speech it may have prevented this controversy in the first place."
Ahmed Versi, editor of the Muslim News, called the apology a "welcome gesture" but said the Pope must address the core of what he had said. "He said Christianity believes in reason, is more logical and doesn't believe in violence. But reason is also the cornerstone of Islamic belief. He should make it clear that Islam does not preach violence."
In Germany, representatives of the country's 3.2 million Muslims, most of them Turks,were satisfied with the Pope's remarks. There was now no reason why he should not visit Turkey in late November as planned, they added. Turkish religious leaders also struck a conciliatory tone yesterday.
In Egypt, Mahmoud Ashour, the former deputy of Cairo's Al-Azhar, the Sunni Arab world's most powerful institution, dismissed the comments as inadequate.
"He should apologise because he insulted the beliefs of Islam. He must apologise in a frank way and say he made a mistake," Mr Ashour told al-Arabiya TV.
And in a sign of how opinion is split, there appeared to be mixed messages from Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood.
The Associated Press quoted the group's leader as saying the Islamic political group's relations with Christians should remain "good, civilised and cooperative".
"While anger over the Pope's remarks was necessary, it shouldn't last for long because while he is the head of the Catholic church in the world, many Europeans are not following it. So what he said won't influence them," said Mohammed Mahdi Akef, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood.
But there were other reports that after initially saying the Pope's statement was "sufficient", the group felt it did "not rise to the level of a clear apology" and called for an act of contrition that would "decisively end any confusion".
In Iran, anger against the Pope was growing. As well as student protests, the Vatican's ambassador to Iran, Archbishop Angelo Mottola, was summoned "to receive Iran's strong protest against the Pope's remarks on Islam", the official Irna news agency said.
One Iranian cleric said the Pope's apology could only be accepted if the pontiff fell to his feet. Numerous other religious seminaries in Iran announced they were going on strike.
Vatican advisers will almost certainly be hoping that once the pontiff's conciliatory message filters down to the Muslim street the protests will die off.
But radical Islamist groups - or authoritarian regimes trying to deal with restive Islamist forces in their own societies - might also exploit religious misunderstanding for their own purposes.
Yesterday, two armed Iraqi groups posted threats to the Vatican and the Catholic Church on the internet.
Many still fear a repeat of the Danish cartoon row, which saw protests and violence across the Muslim world on a far greater, and more diffuse, scale than at present, after a rightwing Danish newspaper, the Jutland Post, published a series of cartoons a year ago mocking the Prophet Muhammad as a self-proclaimed exercise in free speech. It was only when, five months later, a group of incensed ultra-conservative Danish imams travelled to the Middle East with the cartoons, that the affair exploded into a cultural row.
The Pope's apology also fails to address, or acknowledge, another root problem: that sensitivities are already inflamed, and there is a widespread perception across the Muslim world that the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were carried out by what many Muslims see as little more than a Christian coalition - a new Crusade.
The Vatican says it is worried about the turn events are taking. The Vatican's spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, said he hoped the death of the Italian nun shot dead while working in Somalia was "an isolated event". "We are worried about the consequences of this wave of hatred and hope it doesn't have grave consequences for the church around the world," he told Ansa news agency.
Conservative politicians in Europe, meanwhile, have made it clear whose side they are on.
Over the weekend, Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, said the Pope had been misunderstood. The general secretary of her Christian Democrat party, Ronald Pofalla, went further, declaring: "All those who attack the Pope are not interested in dialogue. They merely want to intimidate and silence the West."
In the Muslim city of Istanbul, once the Christian capital of Constantinople, the Pope arrives on a huge mission: to undo the Great Schism of 1054 and reunite Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christianity. This is not to everyone's liking: reactionaries from Opus Dei, the dark operators of Turkey's security "deep state", and the evil geniuses of Italy's P-2 masonic lodge form an alliance to stop the Vatican. In Istanbul, a journalist is contracted to assassinate the pope.
Such is the plot of the potboiler racing up the bestseller lists in Turkey. Uncannily coinciding with the Vatican-Islam tension and ahead of Pope Benedict XVI's November visit to Turkey, the Turkish writer Yücel Kaya published his thriller "Attack on the Pope" in May. The pope and his coterie will require a diplomacy lacking in the Regensburg homily to negotiate this trip.
Ian Traynor
http://www.guardian.co.uk/pope/story/0,,1874853,00.html
BY MARK FORD - 12:44 - 20 October 2005
Six sheep gruesomely killed on Dartmoor may be the victims of ritual slaughter at the hands of occultists, it emerged last night.
Police are investigating whether the deaths near an ancient Pagan altar on the isolated moor are the second case of ritual sheep slaughter to have occurred in the area this year.
The animals were found with their necks broken and eyes gouged out on land at Moortown.
Four of the bodies were arranged in a square shape, another two lying near a pattern of stones.
Their owner, farmer Daniel Alford, is convinced they were killed as part of a Pagan ritual.
"You hear crazy stuff like that around Dartmoor," he said. "People believe in all sorts of strange things."
BY MARK FORD
09:30 - 20 October 2005
The spectre of occult practices in the West reared its head yesterday as police investigated a second case of ritual sheep slaughter near an ancient Pagan altar on an isolated moor.
Six sheep were found with their necks broken and their eyes removed on land at Moortown near the edge of Dartmoor. Four of their bodies were arranged in a regular square shape, another two were lying next to a pattern of stones.
In January, seven sheep were found just half-a-mile away in the same eerie shadow of Vixen Tor. Again their necks were broken, and this time chillingly arranged in the shape of a heptagram - a seven-pointed star symbol, linked for centuries with the dark arts and Black Magic rituals.
Now, the Western Daily Press can reveal that police are connecting the incidents with the presence of an ancient Pagan sacrificial altar, the stone remains of which are located just to the east of the tor.
"Our understanding is that this place used to be some sort of meeting place for Pagans," said a spokesman for Devon and Cornwall police.
"To the east of Vixen Tor there is evidence of an ancient stone sacrificial altar.
They added: "We are investigating this as a matter of criminal damage.
"People obviously have their right to practise their religion, but when that involves damaging, or in this case killing, other people's property, it becomes a crime." The dead sheep, worth £600, were still warm when they were found by their owner, farmer Daniel Alford, on Sunday morning.
He has little doubt the shocking incident has its roots in Pagan ritual.
"You hear of all sorts of crazy stuff like that around Dartmoor, it's that sort of place, people believe in all sorts of strange things," he said yesterday.
"It is a bit unsettling knowing that someone has been creeping around up there doing this, but there's not a lot we can do, it's such a vast area.
"There were the four sheep and then 10ft or 15ft away there were another two, which were laid next to three stones which had been arranged in a pattern," he said.
"The stones looked like a kind a of gateway, a similar thing that had been found in January.
"After talking to a few people we established that it was probably something to do with Janus the Pagan god of January and the beginning of the New Year and banishing evil spirits.
"What this one is about, I've no idea. It was a full moon."
In this case, the eyes were completely removed from the sheep, and there were no signs of the messy pecking that could attribute the loss to an attack by birds.
Police confirmed the animals had their necks quickly broken and there were no indications of a prolonged struggle or suffering.
It is thought at least two people would have to had to have been involved, given the sheer physical strength needed for the killing and arranging of the sheep.
Vixen Tor and the Alford family have gained notoriety recently in a high-profile right-to-roam row with ramblers, walkers and climbers.
In 2003, the Alfords controversially ended 30 years of permitted access to the tor on the grounds they could be held liable if there was an accident on it.
Earlier this year, the decision was upheld by an inquiry inspector who ruled against opening up the land under Countryside and Rights of Way legislation.
Last month those demanding access to the tor and the land it stands on mounted a peaceful protest on the Alfords' land.
Yesterday Daniel Alford said he did not believe the clash over access was in anyway connected to the disturbing finds.
"I really don't think it is the sort of thing the Thermos flask brigade would get involved in," he said.
May 20, 2005, 8:18 PM -
http://www.freep.com/news/statewire/sw116117_20050520.htm
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (AP) -- A full-page advertisement as an open letter to President Bush signed by 823 people affiliated with Calvin College was published in Friday's editions of The Grand Rapids Press, protesting his planned appearance as the school's commencement speaker.
The signees -- self-described alumni, students, faculty and "friends" of the Christian liberal arts college -- said they are "deeply troubled" that Bush will be the speaker at Saturday's ceremony.
"In our view, the policies and actions of your administration, both domestically and internationally over the past four years, violate many deeply held principles of Calvin College," their ad said.
White House spokesman Taylor Gross said he had not seen the ad.
"The president appreciates Americans' right to peacefully protest and to express their views," Gross said. "It's an important part of our democracy and the president respects an individual's right to free speech."
School spokesman Phil de Haan called the advertisement's language "troubling" and "unnecessarily divisive."
"Many of the statements in the ad seem to suggest that those who drafted the ad somehow speak for the entire college," he said. "Obviously, this is not the case."
Sally Steenland, a 1969 Calvin graduate who consults on religious issues for the Center for American Progress, organized the ad campaign. John Podesta, President Clinton's chief of staff, founded the Washington-based research and educational institute.
She said she was compelled by her relationship with the school, her views about Bush and the religious principles of her alma mater -- not by her relationship with the think tank.
"I'm doing this as a labor of love with a team who have been working night and day to collect signatures," she told The Grand Rapids Press.
Steenland also consults for the Center for Women Policy Studies and teaches writing in the Washington area.
Newsweek magazine and other national publications speculated that Bush agreed to speak at Calvin as a way to reach out to his evangelical base in a Midwestern state. But Calvin officials said there was more to his decision than preaching to the faithful.
"I think the White House knows Calvin is not a clone of the more fundamental universities, like Bob Jones University," Provost Joel Carpenter told the Grand Rapids paper. "It's an opportunity to extend their constituency."
Bush's appearance may signal a desire to identify himself more closely with the Christian center rather than with the religious right, where critics often have pigeonholed him, said the Rev. Peter Borgdorff, executive director of ministries for the Christian Reformed Church.
Calvin, which is affiliated with the church, was founded in 1876. It is one of the largest Christian colleges in North America, with more than 4,000 students and 50,000 living alumni, de Haan said.
"I think Calvin College represents a more centrist place on the spectrum than perhaps some other places," said Borgdorff, who has met with Bush as a board member for the faith-based Call to Renewal anti-poverty movement. "He knows better than to assume every Christian college is associated with the religious right. The president is interested in being perceived as a religious moderate, not a religious extreme."
http://www.freep.com/news/statewire/sw116117_20050520.htm
Mar 20 2005
http://www.sundaymirror.co.uk/news/news/tm_objectid=15312906&method=full&siteid=106694&headline=vip-orgy-name_page.html
World Exclusive by Graham Johnson (Investigations Editor) and Grant Hodgson
PRINCE Andrew's female bodyguard has been caught having sex on film at Britain's biggest VIP orgy.
Firearms cop Sarah Cox was snapped romping at the sex party alongside 300 other depraved swingers.
After tearing off her clothes, WPC Cox - who also guards PM Tony Blair at Chequers - and her cop boyfriend plunged into the orgy on a 20ft by 14 ft steel-reinforced bed.
ORGY: Revellers writhe on the huge orgy bed
Fever Club orgy bosses put Cox, 26, and PC Bernard Bourdillon, 36, in charge of security at the £150-a- couple party in a £15million London mansion.
But the police couple are regular swingers too - and as the night wore on THEY threw off their clothes and joined the throng of writhing bodies.
Thames Valley Police chiefs will be horrified by their antics and the couple - who boasted about borrowing police metal detectors to search guests - could face disciplinary action.
Only Britain's elite, including aristocrats, politicians, civil servants and lawyers, are allowed to join the secret society, which met for its first orgy of 2005 last Saturday night.
Rich brokers from City institutions Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutschebank and Commerzbank indulged in a free-for-all with scientists, lawyers, corporate directors, a TV presenter, fashion models and an Olympic athlete.
In an undercover operation, Sunday Mirror investigators posing as security men looked on as a mass of naked men and women romped on a pink satin-covered bed in the main candle-lit "playroom". Another 11 couples were having sex on marble-topped gilt tables, and on the floor two women were fondling each other while performing sex acts on FIVE men.
The night of debauchery began at 9pm. Guests arrived in a fleet of limousines and stepped on to a purple carpet across the pavement outside the 24-bedroom former ambassadorial residence opposite BBC Radio One's offices in London's Portland Place. One Italian heiress was dressed in a £4,000 Dolce & Gabbana gown.
They were greeted by the party's organisers - the men behind Fever Parties are property tycoon Jonathan Friedman, 41, and married right-wing anti-Europe politician David Russell Walters, 44.
The pair use professional events organiser Emma Sayles, 26, to front their organisation. Her father is a Cambridge-educated former Welsh Guards' officer.
For security reasons members were ticked off a photographic guest list to make sure that there were no impostors.
Then they were searched by off-duty Thames Valley firearms cops Cox and Bourdillon using handheld metal detectors.
Their job was to take mobile phones and cameras from guests.
Dark-haired bisexual Cox wore a tight-fitting, short flower print dress and Bourdillon wore beige chinos and a blue shirt. "A couple of people got stroppy," said Bourdillon, an armed police constable based at High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. "But once we explained the need to do it they were like, 'Oh, all right then'."
Asked if he had found any illegal substances, Bourdillon said: "The only thing I've found is four Viagra. They were confiscated."
Cox, a PC based in Windsor, Berkshire - near where Prince Andrew lives - added: "That's our big worry. If we found anything we'd have to confiscate it because of our jobs." Later our investigators found evidence of drugs, smuggled in by guests, in the venue's toilets.
The party's floor manager was also offered a powdered cocktail called Magic by a guest - a combination of pure ecstasy and speed.
In the lobby the guests were greeted by a tanned semi-naked harpist wearing a white basque and lacy stockings who later joined the sex party during her break.
The immaculately-groomed guests were then led through to a cocktail reception where they chatted politely. Celebrity DJ Dan Lywood, former boyfriend of Zoe Ball, played dance music. Beautiful guests had flown in from New York, Paris, Italy, Germany and Holland especially for the party.
At about 10.30pm the first couple followed a trail of red rose petals up the sweeping stone staircase, through oak-panelled doors into the main playroom. The woman, a marketing executive with blonde bobbed hair, stripped off to reveal a G-string and began having sex with her partner, a city banker.
A second couple played with a sex toy while being watched by a group of women. After about half-an-hour there were 60 people having sex on the vast bed, reinforced with steel plates to bear the weight.
The room, decorated by film set designers for £7,000, was candlelit. Classical music played in the background. Around the bed three couples were having sex against radiators and two women fondled each other while performing sex acts on several men.
One fashion model having sex with a lawyer groaned in ecstasy. Another man fed her grapes from a cut-glass bowl, Belgian chocolates and Laurent Perrier champagne straight from the bottle while fondling her breasts.
The owner of the £15million mansion, toff Edward Davenport, was filmed kissing and fondling a woman on the bed.
Davenport, a property developer who is worth £133million, also has residences in Monte Carlo, Mayfair and the West Country.
He made a fortune organising debauched Gatecrasher Balls for public school teenagers in the 1980s but was later jailed for VAT fraud on tickets.
After finishing their security duties Cox and Bourdillon came upstairs. Cox took off her dress to reveal a large, tribal-style tattoo across her back and an expensive black thong and bra.
Sunday Mirror investigators saw Cox perform oral sex on Bourdillon in front of 100 naked guests while sitting on the edge of the bed. They then jumped on top to have sex with each other.
Cox later came out of the playroom wearing only a black choker and her underwear and danced provocatively with Bourdillon in the cocktail lounge.
She told our investigators: "I work as one of Prince Andrew's protection officers. It's a good laugh. I know he gets quite a bit of stick in the Press but he's actually an alright bloke. He's not so aloof with people once he gets to know them. He calls me by my first name. I work in firearms, I'm trained in that. I just have to accompany him with other protection officers whenever he's being driven about."
Talking about using police equipment to carry out searches at the orgy, she added: "We used the equipment from the station. There's no problem with it because they're not supposed to be in use.
"Next time I'll bring some evidence bags. I could have used them to put people's belongings in."
Cox revealed that she is bisexual. She said: "I'm in a committed relationship so these events are good for me because it allows me to explore my sexuality.
"It can be a bit uncomfortable if I'm with Dillan (the name she uses for Bourdillon) and I see someone I fancy but who he doesn't like because I can't always go with them, so I just have to go, 'Aww'."
Bourdillon said: "We've been doing it for a couple of years.
"We weren't going to work here tonight because we weren't sure if one of us was going to be on a shift.
"It turned out all right though and Johnny (Friedman) phoned us begging to help out. We don't mind doing it as a favour. We get in for free and have a few drinks.
"It's the first time we've done an event as big as this."
Referring to the metal detectors, Bourdillon said: "We've brought them from the station. There's no problem because there are lots of them up there so even if something happens tonight they won't be missed."
Later he denied taking them from any police station, saying they were from "central stores".
"No one else at the station knows that we go to parties like this.
"I don't really mind but I don't want them to because all they will do is take the Mick.
"I'm not really comfortable here. It's too formal. There's too many people."
After deciding that was enough, they dressed, had a couple more drinks, then left.
Last night Bourdillon confirmed he and Cox had been at the party, but denied they'd been moonlighting as they were not paid.
"I certainly haven't done anything illegal or against any codes of conduct," he said. "We were there as a favour to friends."
A Home Office spokesman said: "Police officers must inform their chief officer if they wish to pursue outside business interests for gain, be it financial or otherwise.
"It is then down to the chief officer to give permission.
"It would be inappropriate to use police equipment in non- police matters."
Fever owner David Russell Walters told our investigator: "We asked them (Cox and Bourdillon) to frisk people down. We didn't pay them because they are clients of ours.
"We took it that they would come and do that a for a few hours and they would be free to enjoy the rest of the party .
"They got free entry in exchange."
Edward Davenport said: "I was there a little bit. I am not a swinger.
"I am used to quite wild parties. But I didn't get involved.
"I'm not embarrassed about it. They had a good-looking crowd there. Mostly models."
Mar 20 2005
http://www.sundaymirror.co.uk/news/news/tm_objectid=15312912%26method=full%26siteid=106694%26headline=-name_page.html
By Graham Johnson And Grant Hodgson
The beautiful blonde in high heels and skin-tight designer dress caught the eye of a successful young businessman.
They walked towards each other across a packed dancefloor, then she touched him on the arm - the signal swingers use to show they want to have sex.
After a brief exchange of words the couple joined 60 other swingers on a huge bed in the "party" room.
As they took off their clothes and began intimately caressing each other, they were ogled by men standing around the orgy.
This was just one of the debauched scenes at the latest swingers' party organised by Fever - one of the biggest and most exclusive sex clubs in the world.
One party-goer who witnessed the scenes said: "These are some of the most wealthy and powerful people in Britain - the capital city's movers and shakers - and they were all writhing naked together on a bed as big as a suburban swimming pool."
The event in London's Portman Square last Saturday was Fever's biggest in the capital so far. More than 100 couples paid £150 in advance - or £200 on the door - to take part. One of the guests was Harlequins rugby star James Hayter who was hired as a bouncer, but liked what he saw so much he dived in too!
Many of the partygoers - who have to be under 40, well-heeled and good looking - have since emailed the Fever website with "thank you for having us" messages, hailing the party as "mind- blowing" and the "best ever".
In a series of raunchy party recollections, they:
Last night messages from 25 partygoers were posted on the group's website.
A 24-year-old woman, who was at her first Fever party, says: "What an amazing evening. Sex, sex and, er, more sex. Ladies, if you are single or fancy sneaking away from your man, come to Fever.
"I spent most of the night with the most gorgeous couple who were fabulous in the bedroom." Another message from a 21-year-old woman says: "I had a great time and will definitely praise Fever in my London student article.
"Only joking. Sorry to have disappointed you by not being an undercover investigative journalist!"
A couple, aged 35 and 29, say: "It was absolutely mind-blowing. We met and partied with several other sexy couples - had an absolutely amazing time. The night was a perfect combination of all our best past adventures and encounters, both sexual and social, all wrapped into one great, glamorous, friendly and fun party."
Another couple, both 31, write: "It feels mildly amusing to be sitting down and politely writing a thank-you note after last night's party. Whatever would my mother say?
"The venue was superb, the atmosphere electric, with sparks of sexual tension searing between the guests almost from the first moments.
"It was impossible not to be raised to new sexual highs and not to just close your eyes and let the eager hands, mouths and bodies of everyone else there caress and stimulate you into sexual oblivion, over and over. Fabulous."
A third couple, aged 35 and 29, who were at their first Fever party, say: "We had an absolutely excellent time and were amazed at both the expert organisation and high level of talent among the partygoers."
Yet another pair, aged 31 and 30, say: "We would definitely like to attend future parties and we are still talking about that bed and how we had so much fun on it."
A 34-year-old and his 23-year-old partner say: "It was really wonderful to meet so many cool, beautiful, open-minded and respectful people."
But there is some criticism, too. Two Fever regulars, aged 33 and 27, moan: "We felt that the venue was a little cold in places. The toilets also lacked a little in cleanliness and decor. There was also quite a bit of broken glass around the bar and stair area which wasn't good for the bare-footed."
Fever organisers have also posted their own message, hailing the night a success. They boast: "Over 250 partygoers sipped champagne and cocktails and mingled for several hours between the open log fires, the vast, gilt-edged mirrors and the glittering chandeliers.
"Around 11.15pm the keenest swingers graduated up the towering, rose-strewn stairway towards the playrooms on the first floor. At the same time the first of the DJs took to the tables and upped the atmosphere. The main playroom centred on a huge specially -constructed bed covered in pink satin that was in continuous use by sometimes more than 60 people for over six hours."
EDWARD DAVENPORT, 38
Made first million in his teens organising the infamous Gatecrasher balls - now a property tycoon worth £133m. Spends six months a year in Monaco as a tax exile sharing £200-a-night hotel suite with two women. Shares £15million London pad with three more. He was seen kissing and fondling a girl on the orgy bed last Saturday night.
He bought the venue, a former ambassador's residence, from the Sierra Leone government in 2002 for the knockdown price of just £50,000.
DAVID RUSSELL WALTERS, 44
By day ex-Tory candidate and boss of anti-Europe Democracy Movement. By night, orgy master tending to guests. Looked on as four girls, one a Dutch rowing champ, pleasured each other.
JONATHAN FRIEDMAN, 42
Brains behind Fever's image. Spends hours "dressing" rooms with pink satin, chocolates, fruit, and jelly babies for energy. Seen canoodling on the bed with beautiful American blonde.
EMMA SAYLE, 26
Diplomat's daughter. Dad was colonel with the Welsh Guards and has an OBE. She is regarded as one of Britain's best and most upmarket party organisers - didn't join in the orgy.
JAMES HAYTER, 26
Professional rugby player. Hayter, who is over 6ft tall and weighs 220 lb, was Hired as a bouncer but became overwhelmed with lust. Stripped off and joined in the night's action.
CHARITY BOSS
International charity director had sex with female TV production company boss.
CRIME BOSS
Heir to a multi-million crime empire bonked French, Russian, Italian models and a designer.
WILD CHILD
Raunchy daughter of a legendary rock star had public sex with a top media lawyer.
FILM DIRECTOR
Movie bigwig and his catwalk model lover had sex with at least seven other couples.
FEVER CLUB parties first became notorious when senior Conservative Party strategist Douglas Smith was exposed as a founding member in 2003. The 42-year-old, who preached the Tories' morally-focused back-to-basics policy, was forced to cut his links with Fever and is now an adviser and speech writer to senior MPs.
The club started in January 1998 with a debauched launch party in a Central London penthouse. The 2,500 worldwide members include captains of industry, celebrities and multi-millionaire tycoons. Critics have accused the secretive organisation of being a sinister networking organisation.
Orgies for the rich and beautiful are hosted twice yearly in London and Manchester but there are parties over the summer in New York and Ibiza. Fever receives over 400 applications for each party and the vetting process is extremely strict. But the upper age limit of 40 was recently raised from 35 to take account of the advancing years of some of the organisers.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/england/devon/4171399.stm
The sheep were found on Sampford Spiney on Dartmoor with their necks broken and their bodies in a pattern sometimes associated with the occult.
The pattern was similar to the shape of a star, or heptagram, a mystical symbol commonly used in occult ceremonies.
Chris Cole, a farmer who owned some of the sheep, said he first thought they were killed by a lightning strike.
Mr Cole, one of three farmer who owned the animals, said he thought it was lightning because "that's what happens when you find groups of animals dead like that".
He said when he realised the animals were left in the seven-pointed shape: "It's scared some people and worried them, me included, being this close to home.
"I don't really know what's happened. It's more what we are imagining happened here now."
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/england/devon/4171399.stm
Published: 2005/01/13 16:28:29 GMT
First published on Friday 16 August 2002:
http://www.thisisthenortheast.co.uk/the_north_east/archive/2002/08/16/A75e3n .reby.html
by Julia Breen
PRIME Minister Tony Blair's former parish priest was last night facing jail after groping a ten-year-old boy at his North-East vicarage.
The Reverend George Glover - known as "Father Eddie" to his parishioners - lured the youngster into his home and carried out an indecent assault.
Last night, child protection campaigners urged religious organisations to tighten up their safeguards on child abuse to prevent any further cases.
The former Anglican vicar of Mr Blair's parish in Trimdon, County Durham, was convicted by a jury yesterday at Newcastle Crown Court.
The court heard that while Glover was at St Chad's Church in Gateshead last year, he flouted church rules when he invited the boy into his home and was alone with the youngster.
The boy had called round to visit the vicar and his wife, Maria, after school on April 12, last year.
Penny Moreland, prosecuting, told the court that Glover's wife was not at home when the boy turned up.
She said: "Glover pulled him across on to his knee, put his hand down his trousers and touched him.
"The boy said he was frightened by what was happening and did not know what was going to happen next.
"He saw it was 4.30pm, said 'I've got to go for my tea', and ran away from the house.
The boy later told his mother, who complained to the authorities the next morning, and Glover was arrested.
Last night, he was remanded in custody until sentencing for his own safety, after concerns were raised during the trial that he might take his own life.
Glover will be sentenced on October 4 after reports are prepared. He showed no emotion as he was led to the cells.
In 1997, he faced a rare ecclesiastical hearing after a parishioner in Trimdon accused him of adultery while he was vicar at St Mary Magdelene church in the village.
Margaret Orpen accused him of having sex with her in his car and making her pregnant.
Glover, who was married with two daughters, could have been defrocked if he had been found guilty.
But the case was dropped, and Glover was cleared after pregnancy tests proved negative. Mrs Orpen was diagnosed as "delusional" by a psychiatrist.
Mrs Orpen said last night she would be seeing a solicitor in a bid to have her case against Glover reopened.
She said her own doctor had contested the psychiatrist's findings in the case.
"I want to see justice done," said Mrs Orpen.
Last night, Sue Woolmore, the NSPCC's policy advisor for the North of England, said: "The NSPCC encourages all organisations, including religious ones, to look very closely at what kind of safeguards they have in place to prevent these incidents.
"We advise parents with any concerns at all of this nature to keep shouting about it until someone listens. They can speak to police, social services, or ring our helpline if they have concerns.
"But the Church of England, and particularly the Catholic Church, are working with us on their child protection policies."
The Bishop of Durham has expressed his "deepest regret" to the boy's family
A Church statement read: "The diocese acted immediately and appropriately and accordingly to the prescribed Church of England procedures as soon as the complaint was made.
"Pastoral care and counselling have been provided to the family."
In addition to the sentence of the court, Glover will face disciplinary sanctions under ecclesiastical law.
*The NSPCC helpline is 0808-800 5000.
http://www.thisisthenortheast.co.uk/the_north_east/archive/2002/08/16/A75e3n .reby.html
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,9115,1398731,00.html
Michael Walsh
Wednesday January 26, 2005
The Guardian
Rocco Buttiglione, the erstwhile Italian EU commissioner, must have some sympathy with Ruth Kelly. Instead of getting on with the job to which Silvio Berlusconi had advanced him, he was closely questioned by European parliamentarians about his religious beliefs. His candidature was eventually withdrawn, and he departed to found a new Catholic political alliance.
Now here is Ruth Kelly, eager to get stuck into her new role as secretary of state for education, and yet all everyone wants to know, apart from how she copes with a cabinet rank and four small children, is where Opus Dei fits in. If indeed she is a member. No one is saying. She has spiritual support from them, but that is a private matter, she told David Frost on Sunday.
Maybe, but her answer is rather disingenuous. Opus Dei comes surrounded by a political miasma. It was founded just before the Spanish civil war, but came fully into being in the heady Catholic days of Franco's cruzado. Camino (The Way), the handbook that guides the spiritual life of Opus Dei adherents, was published in its final version just as the civil war ended. When Opus came to prominence in the late 1960s it was because Franco's cabinet contained a remarkably large number of Opusdeistas - far too many for commentators to believe it a coincidence. Senior members, including Opus's founder St Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, Marqués de Peralta, were involved in negotiating the handover of power to the then Prince Juan Carlos, rather than to his father, Don Juan.
Opus members were powerful operators in 1960s Spain and again, it was alleged, during the Aznar government. The organisation's public persona in Spain wasn't helped by the discovery that adherents helping to fund its remarkable growth were involved in two of that country's major financial scandals. The sinister, secretive image was boosted in the US when an FBI agent was convicted four years ago of spying for the Russians. He was an Opus member, and his brother-in-law an Opus Dei priest. The lurid picture in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, of an Opus Dei "monk" wreaking mayhem around Europe on the instructions of his religious superior, has only added to their curiosity value.
If a member, Ruth Kelly would have been a typical recruit, the sort of person targeted by the organisation as a potentially influential member of society. They tend to recruit from the middle class, give adherents a traditional theological education, and subject them to an old-fashioned spiritual training - including wearing spike bracelets, and beating oneself with a cat o'nine-tails. Given this conservative background, it is scarcely surprising that many Opusdeistas turn out to be supporters of rightwing regimes. Kelly, on the left of centre, is therefore something of an exception.
Their moral views, however, are more of a piece, and highly unlikely to deviate from those espoused by the Vatican. And these, as Buttiglione and US presidential contender John Kerry both found, can be something of a handicap in public life, especially when the Vatican tells politicians to toe the Catholic line on matters such as abortion. From the status of women to the teaching on stem-cell research to the recognition of same-sex unions, Pope John Paul II has resolutely followed a path at odds with the modern world. Catholic parliamentarians have too often to struggle between their faith and the convictions of the vast majority of their constituents. As Aidan O'Neill QC put it in a recent debate at Lincoln's Inn presided over by Cherie Booth, should they attempt to enact a form of Catholic Sharia? Many Catholics would say no, but Opus members are fiercely loyal to the present Pope. He has not only canonised their founder, but has also given them a new juridical structure which, they believe, fits their particular way of life.
For Opus is one of a kind. Within Roman Catholicism it has a unique status as a "personal prelature", a kind of diocese without geographical boundaries, with which all its members are associated, but to which its full-time members belong. They are priests and lay people. That makes it different from traditional religious orders which are usually one or the other. Opus embraces all classes of society, married and single, priests and lay people, men and women - though in the last case, never the twain shall meet. The recently constructed US HQ in New York has separate entrances for men and women. There are even, according to the authors of The Rough Guide to the Da Vinci Code, gender-specific parking lots.
In this country, Opus's HQ is in Bayswater, west London. Its members run university halls of residence and youth clubs - fertile territory for new recruits. In the US and elsewhere there are Opus Dei schools, hot on traditional values. But not yet in Britain. In a variant of the postcode lottery, devout British parents have been known to relocate to Ireland where such colleges may be found. The education secretary says she wants more independent state schools, strong on discipline. Her spiritual advisers may have suggestions.
· Michael Walsh is a Catholic scholar and the author of Opus Dei
mjwalsh@heythrop.ac.uk
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,9115,1398731,00.html
Christmas is increasingly about rampant commercialism, streets awash with thousands of people pushing and shoving, and, so far one can tell, not having a lot of fun.
Somehow the whole sense of family, of community, of peaceful communion seems to have been lost along with the religious core which once underpinned our Christmas celebrations. If, as a recent survey discovered, Christmas is increasingly experienced as being a source not of joy but of stress, then we really do need to take a look at what is going on.
Of course it's enjoyable to give and receive gifts. But do we really need to do so on the scale we do? Is there really a link between happiness and owning the latest computer console and game, or getting that must have wide-screen TV? The answer must be no.
I wonder if perhaps we have lost more than a ready opportunity to sing Christmas carols or attend a midnight service at our local church, as we have rushed headlong to embrace the hedonist consumer-fest that Christmas has become. Surely Christmas should be about spending quality time with family and friends, our nearest and dearest. How could any amount of material goodies be as important as that?
I really hope that this Christmas, more people aim for a Christmas which is not about destroying the planet with consumerism, and take the time just be peaceful with family and friends. Who knows, we might even enjoy it.
Chris Ballance MSP http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/ msp/membersPages/chris_ballance/
08NovN04 - Pravda.us
http://pravda.us/printed.html?news_id=14550
Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey
Between a cult of Satanic devil-worshippers and a group of Christians, which of the two would condone an act of mass murder, torture, rape, destruction of homes, wanton vandalism and acts of terrorism? The former, or the latter?
Anywhere else in the world, it would be considered that only those who walk in legion with Satan would or could support such shocking acts of butchery. Not so in the USA apparently, where the so-called Christian Fundamentalists handed George Bush the presidency on a silver platter, complete with a pat on the back and a reassuring wink. More of the same, George, more of the same.
However, what "Christians" are these and whose Bible are they bashing?
Christianity stands for the values preached by Jesus Christ, which, like other main religions, are based upon the principles of peace, love, tolerance, dialogue and fundamentally, the respect for life, property and the basic laws which govern mankind. The main religions are guardians of the unwritten bond which defines human decency and that which is considered as unacceptable.
In simple terms, easily understood by a homo sapiens sapiens who lived in islands of civilization among the wilderness, the division between these two precepts was described as the realm of God and the realm of the Devil, Heaven and Hell, Good and Evil.
Since the writing of the Scriptures, Mankind has periodically misused, abused and disused the original objectives of the word, namely to provide an explanation of the unknown and more importantly, rules within which Mankind should live.
Few civilizations have been guiltless in this impulsive act of blasphemy, mixed with the temptation to mix Church and State to strengthen the latter, raising religious banners which in many cases were historically more powerful than national ones, due to the trans-national nature of religion.
Yet today, two thousand years after the Passion of Christ and fifteen hundred years after the death of Muhammed, we continue to see acts of depravity and blasphemy justified under religious banners on a scale as primary and warped as that used five hundred years ago by the Inquisition.
One such example was the blasphemy of the Taleban regime, which usurped the Noble Qu'ran and substituted its core message with a mixture of Pashtun lore and extremist Islamist law. The result: an insult and a direct attack against Islam itself. Similarly, the so-called Christian Fundamentalists in the United States of America, whose warped and blasphemic view of their religion supports the acts of the Bush regime.
The Christian Fundamentalists of America are the mirror image of the Taleban, both of which insult and deny their Gods.
How can any Christian, in whatever shape or form, support an act of murder, much less mass murder? How can any Christian turn a blind eye to acts of torture? How can any Christian accept an act of rape? Did these fundamentalist Christians in the USA know when they voted for Bush that a substantial number of sisters, wives and mothers of men wanted by the USA in Iraq were raped in custody and rather than abort or face the humility of their condition, meted out by the soldiers of Bush, preferred to commit suicide?
Did these Fundamentalist Christians know that Bush's military forces targeted civilian infra-structures so that rebuilding contracts worth billions of dollars could be handed to Cheney's friends at Halliburton without even the decency of a tender?
In targeting civilian infra-structures, we are speaking about power plants, which keep babies alive in winter, we are speaking about water supply systems, we are speaking about electricity units, we are speaking about schools, we are speaking about hospitals.
Where in the Christian faith does it state that it is acceptable to destroy such structures? Where in the Christian religion does it state that a soldier should open fire on civilians, including children, yelling "Burn, you mother-f-. Burn"?
Where in the Christian religion is it stated that a soldier can stick his automatic weapon in the face of a frightened six-year-old boy and scream: "Get ya f- hands up, now?"
No, it is no good to simply deny everything and turn to the cross. Such instances are documented and recorded. They happened and continue to happen and will continue to happen, so long as Bush and his evil regime, which hoodwinked their people with ludicrous tales of fear, which made fools out of America's good people with their lies, continues in power. The good Christians of the united States of America have just given a four-year lease of life to this Satanistic regime.
As everyone now knows and as George Bush himself now admits, Iraq and 9/11 were unconnected, wholly and totally unconnected. Saddam Hussein is not Bin Laden, indeed they hate each other and Islamism detests Saddam Hussein as being not Islamist enough. Therefore any connection between Islamist terrorism and Iraq is in plain English, and I apologize, bullshit.
Yet this bullshit sees US troops, every day, slaughtering Iraqis, including women and children and let it be said that if any Iraqi men are resisting this illegal invasion (which breaks the UN Charter and also breached the Geneva Convention, on many counts), are only doing what any patriotic US citizen would do if his country was invaded.
Therefore every time that the Christian Fundamentalists of America enter into a Church and are faced by a barrage of blasphemy connecting Christ or Christianity to Bush, may they choke on the Host if they believe it.
The Christian Fundamentalists of the United States of America are, at best, a well-meaning slice of the population which allowed itself to be misled and deceived by its collective ignorance and bloody-mindedness. At worst, they are a gullible clique of sniveling sycophants who cow-tow to authority, whatever it is and whatever its precepts, listening blindly to the criminals who burn their money every month in acts of depravity, the hard-earned money which they donate to their "churches", so often controlled by masters of mass hysteria who once again have mastered the gift of mixing religion and politics.
The Christian religion has nothing to do with what Bush is doing abroad. The Christian religion never did, does not and never will, condone acts of murder, condone acts of torture, condone acts of rape, condone invasion of property, condone acts of disrespect for human life.
Iraq is not about 9/11, it is about oil and a geo-strategic position because Saudi Arabia is becoming too unstable. Afghanistan was not about bin Laden, it was about the pipeline for gas from Turkmenistan and Iran is (or will be) about the connectivity of the oil and gas pipelines, greatly benefiting the corporate elite which gravitates around the White House, in the figures of Messrs. Cheney and Rumsfeld.
Those who wish to disbelieve and cocoon themselves in a nice, cozy, protective environment, believing that Mr. President knows what he is doing, will soon see the errors in their judgement. Mr. President, in this case, does what he is told.
And the forces behind Mr. President are not Christian or Islamic or anything else remotely religious. They are guided by greed, by the lust and thirst and quest for power, in short, they are guided by the precepts upon which Satan acts and they are wily enough to have duped the good Christians of the United States of America hook, line and sinker.
They have taken these good people, they have insulted their beliefs and they have manipulated them, through fear.
To conclude, a message from my friend of 26 years, Ali, who I spent three years with at University, whose son Rashid, six years old, was in Baghdad in the opening days of George Bush's Shock and Awe campaign.
He told me, among many tears staining the writing paper, that his son Rashid had been killed as he stayed with his grandparents in Baghdad, at the beginning of the horrific bombing campaign unleashed by the Bush regime, supported by the fundamentalist Christians of the USA.
He had been found by his grandmother in the ruins of her home, with a gaping hole in his abdomen through which blood and faeces seeped. Knowing his condition, he bravely looked into his grandmother's eyes and said: "Grandmother, please tell daddy that I was brave and didn't cry".
Then he died. Six years old.
How can any Christian anywhere on earth say that he supports such Satanistic acts of depravity? These are not the soldiers of Christ. They are the legions of Baal. And the Christian Fundamentalists of the United States of America, in voting in favour of the regime which perpetrated these evil actions, are as guilty as the demons which performed them.
Call yourselves anything you like, but do not insult Christianity and please do not insult the Christians who respect the fundamental principles of the religion, by calling yourselves Christians. Instead, call yourselves a cult of Satan worshippers, or the like.
And be ashamed of what you have done, namely supporting a regime of mass murderers and war criminals.
Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey
http://pravda.us/printed.html?news_id=14550
Pravda.Ru
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6511.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/17/opinion/17KRIS.html?th
07/17/04 "New York Times" -- If the latest in the "Left Behind" series of evangelical thrillers is to be believed, Jesus will return to Earth, gather non-Christians to his left and toss them into everlasting fire:
"Jesus merely raised one hand a few inches and a yawning chasm opened in the earth, stretching far and wide enough to swallow all of them. They tumbled in, howling and screeching, but their wailing was soon quashed and all was silent when the earth closed itself again."
These are the best-selling novels for adults in the United States, and they have sold more than 60 million copies worldwide. The latest is "Glorious Appearing," which has Jesus returning to Earth to wipe all non-Christians from the planet. It's disconcerting to find ethnic cleansing celebrated as the height of piety.
If a Muslim were to write an Islamic version of "Glorious Appearing" and publish it in Saudi Arabia, jubilantly describing a massacre of millions of non-Muslims by God, we would have a fit. We have quite properly linked the fundamentalist religious tracts of Islam with the intolerance they nurture, and it's time to remove the motes from our own eyes.
In "Glorious Appearing," Jesus merely speaks and the bodies of the enemy are ripped open. Christians have to drive carefully to avoid "hitting splayed and filleted bodies of men and women and horses."
"The riders not thrown," the novel continues, "leaped from their horses and tried to control them with the reins, but even as they struggled, their own flesh dissolved, their eyes melted and their tongues disintegrated. . . . Seconds later the same plague afflicted the horses, their flesh and eyes and tongues melting away, leaving grotesque skeletons standing, before they, too, rattled to the pavement."
One might have thought that Jesus would be more of an animal lover.
These scenes also raise an eschatological problem: Could devout fundamentalists really enjoy paradise as their friends, relatives and neighbors were heaved into hell?
As my Times colleague David Kirkpatrick noted in an article, this portrayal of a bloody Second Coming reflects a shift in American portrayals of Jesus, from a gentle Mister Rogers figure to a martial messiah presiding over a sea of blood. Militant Christianity rises to confront Militant Islam.
This matters in the real world, in the same way that fundamentalist Islamic tracts in Saudi Arabia do. Each form of fundamentalism creates a stark moral division between decent, pious types like oneself — and infidels headed for hell.
No, I don't think the readers of "Glorious Appearing" will ram planes into buildings. But we did imprison thousands of Muslims here and abroad after 9/11, and ordinary Americans joined in the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in part because of a lack of empathy for the prisoners. It's harder to feel empathy for such people if we regard them as infidels and expect Jesus to dissolve their tongues and eyes any day now.
I had reservations about writing this column because I don't want to mock anyone's religious beliefs, and millions of Americans think "Glorious Appearing" describes God's will. Yet ultimately I think it's a mistake to treat religion as a taboo, either in this country or in Saudi Arabia.
I often write about religion precisely because faith has a vast impact on society. Since I've praised the work that evangelicals do in the third world (Christian aid groups are being particularly helpful in Sudan, at a time when most of the world has done nothing about the genocide there), I also feel a responsibility to protest intolerance at home.
Should we really give intolerance a pass if it is rooted in religious faith?
Many American Christians once read the Bible to mean that African-Americans were cursed as descendants of Noah's son Ham, and were intended by God to be enslaved. In the 19th century, millions of Americans sincerely accepted this Biblical justification for slavery as God's word — but surely it would have been wrong to defer to such racist nonsense simply because speaking out could have been perceived as denigrating some people's religious faith.
People have the right to believe in a racist God, or a God who throws millions of nonevangelicals into hell. I don't think we should ban books that say that. But we should be embarrassed when our best-selling books gleefully celebrate religious intolerance and violence against infidels.
That's not what America stands for, and I doubt that it's what God stands for.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6511.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/17/opinion/17KRIS.html?th
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/tm_objectid=14176476&method=full&siteid=50143&headline=judge-held-in-porn-probe-name_page.html
Apr 24 2004
Bail after he is quizzed
By Richard Smith
A SENIOR judge has been arrested and quizzed by police as part of a nationwide paedophile operation.
Married father-of-four David Selwood, 69, was freed on bail "pending further inquiries", after being interviewed on Wednesday.
The former Army major general was listed to preside over an indecent assault trial in Portsmouth a day later, but did not attend.
He was still off yesterday and the curtains were drawn at his £550,000 home in Winchester, Hants.
Speaking through the intercom system, he said: "Thank you for your inquiry, but I am afraid I am not in a position to say anything."
A spokesman for Portsmouth crown court said: "Judge Selwood has not been at work due to illness. We are not expecting him in next week."
Judge Selwood boasts an illustrious military record and an entry in Who's Who.
The son of a naval commander, he has been a circuit judge in Hampshire since 1992 and resident judge at Portsmouth crown court since 1996.
He is also an author of the Crown Court Index, a respected legal publication which gives advice on any crown court issue.
The judge is married to Barbara and they have three sons and a daughter.
A spokeswoman for Hampshire Police said a man had been arrested in Winchester on Wednesday, "in connection with a paedophile operation".
She added: "The man was interviewed at a police station in Hampshire and has been subsequently released on bail pending further inquiries."
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/tm_objectid=14176476&method=full&siteid=50143&headline=judge-held-in-porn-probe-name_page.html
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in Arlon
(Filed: 20/04/2004)
The youngest survivor of the alleged child murderer Marc Dutroux confronted him in a Belgian court yesterday to ask him why he did not kill her.
Sabine Dardenne electrified the court with her evidence, eight years after Dutroux held her chained in a filthy dungeon as his sex slave.
Sabine Dardenne's evidence electrified the court
She swivelled around in the witness chair to glower through the bullet-proof glass at the man who tormented and brutally raped her - "sweating like an animal" - when she was 12.
"I have one thing to ask of Marc Dutroux, even though I know I think I know the answer. Why didn't he just liquidate me, since he was always complaining about my pig-headed stubbornness?" she said, alluding to the fate of four other girls found dead on his property.
Dutroux replied with his usual cold self-confidence. "It was never my intention to harm her in any way. I recognise that I abused her, and I take responsibility for that. Full stop," he said to gasps from the gallery.
"That is not very convincing," she replied, pulling her hands back through her hair.
Dutroux has denied killing any of the girls, including two eight-year-olds, Melissa Russo and Julie Lejeuene, who starved in his dungeon. He claims that he was a lowly cog in a powerful paedophile network.
Investigators believe that Miss Dardenne was rescued in the nick of time by police. They suspect that he would soon have "disposed" of her after switching his interest to 14-year-old Laetitia Delhez, abducted in August 1996.
The first of the two survivors to take the stand, Miss Dardenne recounted "without hate or fear" how she was seized while riding her bicycle to school in southern Belgium in May 1996.
She was bundled into a van, drugged, and taken to Dutroux's hideaway in the slums of Charleroi, where he stripped her and fixed a chain around her neck.
Claiming that he was saving her from a "wicked chief", he warned her to be a good girl, "or you're dead".
For the next 80 days she was shut in a tiny underground cell, her "chamber of agony", surviving on a diet of "disgusting" tinned food and a jerry-can of brackish water.
Dutroux brought her to the surface for sex sessions, days marked with an X in her heartrending diary.
"If I gave Monsieur pleasure, he allowed me to watch television for one, two, or three hours," she said, speaking forcefully with a nervous laugh, adding that she preferred not to elaborate on the details of what he did to her.
Pol Marchal, the father of one of the dead girls, An Marchal, collapsed after hearing her speak. He was later recovering in hospital.
Miss Dardenne's evidence raises problems for the army of critics who continue to accuse the Belgian judicial system of a cover-up to protect paedophiles in high places. If a child sex network was involved, she never saw direct evidence of it. Dutroux, 47, was her sole tormentor.
Her last three days in the cell were shared with Laetitia Delhez, who said "the whole of Belgium" was searching for her. She doubted the story, believing Dutroux's claims that her family had abandoned her after refusing to pay a ransom.
Confused, she clung to Dutroux as her protector as police hauled her out of the dungeon. "I thanked him as I left. I thought he had saved us. I must have been out of my mind to believe it," she said.
Now a self-assured woman of 20, with a steady job and boyfriend, she displayed a coolness when Dutroux's wife and co-accused, Michelle Martin, begged for forgiveness for failing to alert the police.
"You knew where I was, with whom, and what he had done. I cannot accept your apology," she said.
Miss Dardenne said it was her civic duty to give evidence and show the world that Dutroux had not broken her spirit. Her testimony, devoid of self-pity, prompted effusive praise from the presiding judge, Stephane Goux, who called for "hats off" to honour her courage.
Despite her extraordinary resilience - she was back at school within two weeks of the ordeal in 1996 - some doubt she can entirely put the horrors behind her.
"Nothing is worse for a human being to be the plaything of another. There is a deep wound that will probably never heal," a psychologist said after her appearance.
20 March 2004: The father who must sit and listen to how his daughter was snatched, raped then buried alive
4 March 2004: I was a small cog in a sex-slave ring, but I am no murderer, claims Dutroux
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in Belgium
(Filed: 04/03/2004)
The accused child-murderer Marc Dutroux yesterday denied any role in the gruesome death of four young girls, claiming that he was just a low-level cog in a powerful sex-slave ring and mostly acting under orders.
As Belgian jurors shook their heads, he claimed that he built an underground cell to "protect" his victims from abuse by the sex-crime network.
He accepted responsibility for "regrettable" acts in the mid-1990s but insisted that his only interest was the welfare of the abducted girls.
Ratcheting up his allegations that the child-sex ring reached high into official circles, he claimed yesterday that "two policeman" took part in the abduction of two of the girls, but offered no details.
"I didn't even know what paedophilia was. It was all Chinese to me," he said in his first day on the stand. He was convicted of multiple child rape and torture in 1989 after a decade-long spree of paedophile crimes.
He said the dungeon where eight-year-olds Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo were held in chains and suffered severe rape wounds was intended to shield them from a worse fate.
"I wanted to create a hiding place to save them from being sent to a prostitution ring," he said, when asked why he had concealed the entrance to the filthy cell behind a heavy trap door.
The two girls starved to death after being abandoned when Dutroux was sent to prison for 106 days for car theft.
Describing himself as the victim of a vast miscarriage of justice, he claimed that he had been vilified by hostile media coverage and was being denied "presumption of innocence". If he had strayed, it was because he was abused in childhood.
"My mother couldn't stand me and my father had trouble accepting me, knowing I wasn't his real son," he said, standing behind a bullet-proof shield.
Julie and Melissa were the emblem of the tragedy that transfixed Belgians and brought the country to the brink of revolution in 1996.
Michelle Martin, Dutroux's ex-wife, testified yesterday that she was "too scared" to go down into the dungeon to feed the girls, though she fed two German shepherd dogs that had been left to guard the terrace house under a flyover in the slums of south Charleroi.
Amid gasps from the public gallery, she said she believed that the emaciated creatures - chained to their cell - were "savage beasts" who might kill her.
Martin, 44, who is on trial as an accomplice, admitted that she never asked herself whether the girls were still alive. "I completely blocked the reality of what was happening out of my mind. I know I have some responsibility in the deaths of Julie and Melissa."
She said the reflex of years of slavish subservience to her husband stopped her going to the police to report the abductions.
"I couldn't disobey him; it was like that in our home," she said, adding that she was also concerned that her own two children (later three) would be taken into custody and abused.
Police searched the house after a tip-off but failed to bring sniffer dogs or heat-seeking gear and did not look for a hidden door. It later emerged that the authorities had been warned repeatedly that Dutroux was abducting girls, even receiving a letter from his mother.
Martin claimed that the two girls were still alive when Dutroux returned from prison. She said her husband was far more concerned about dog excrement left in the house than the fate of the girls. It was not until a day later that he called her urgently to come with baby feeding bottles, vitamins and orange juice to revive them.
After Julie died, Dutroux kept her body in the freezer. He later buried the two girls in plastic rubbish bags on his land at another property, driving them by a circuitous route to avoid a customs checkpoint.
Dutroux denied abducting the girls, saying that he discovered Julie Melissa sitting calmly on the sofa at his home in July 1995 after they had been left for safe-keeping by the child sex network.
He claimed that he locked them in the dungeon to keep them out of the hands of his fellow accused, Michel Nihoul, whom he described as the link to the big trafficking networks.
He said Melissa had been raped by one of the group - which made him "angry" - but it was "nothing" compared to what she would have faced with "Nihoul and company".
Julie and Melissa's bodies were found in August 1996 alongside the corpses of An Marchal, 17, and Eefje Lambrechts, 19, whom Dutroux admitted snatching on their way home from a party. He claimed yesterday that "two policeman" took part in their abduction.
As Eefje's family listened in the tiny Arlon court house, he spoke of an oral sex session with their daughter - "a very nice girl".
"I found it a great shame that these girls died. It was a disaster," said Dutroux. Denying that he killed them, he said he left them with his "sidekick" and co-defendant Michel Lelievre, a heroin addict and drug dealer who planned to force the young women into prostitution.
Dutroux's wife said he appeared one day with tears in his eyes saying that An and Eefje had been killed. "We had to snuff them out."
She also accused him of torturing his French business partner Bernard Weinstein to extract more than £10,000 before drugging him and burying him alive at the bottom of the garden.
Dutroux admitted killing Weinstein in earlier police statements but retracted the confession yesterday.
The trial is expected to continue for three to four months.
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe/01/01/pope.ny.ap/
VATICAN CITY (AP) --Pope John Paul II rang in the New Year on Thursday with a renewed call for peace in the Middle East and Africa and the creation of a new world order based on respect for the dignity of man and equality among nations.
John Paul presided over a morning Mass inside St. Peter's Basilica to mark the World Day of Peace, which the Roman Catholic Church celebrates every January 1. He appeared in good form, delivering his entire homily in a strong and clear voice despite a relatively tiring holiday schedule.
This year, John Paul directed his thoughts to continuing conflicts around the globe. But he stressed that to bring about peace, there needs to be a new respect for international law and the creation of a "new international order" based on the goals of the United Nations.
He called for "an order that is able to give adequate solutions to today's problems based on the dignity of the human being, on an integral development of society, on solidarity among nations rich and poor, on the sharing of resources and the extraordinary results of scientific and technical progress."
The pope lamented continuing violence between Israel and the Palestinians, and also offered his prayers for his ambassador to Burundi, Archbishop Michael Courtney, who was gunned down by assailants this week as he returned from a funeral.
John Paul said Courtney was killed "while he carried out his mission in favor of dialogue and reconciliation" in the central African country, which has been wracked by violence for a decade.
"Let us pray for him, hoping that his example and sacrifice will bring about the fruits of peace in Burundi and the world," he said.
Earlier this month, John Paul issued a formal document marking the World Day of Peace in which he called for a reform of the United Nations and international law to deal with the evolving threat of terrorism.
He said a new respect for international law was the only way to achieve peace and guarantee against the arbitrary use of force. He did not mention the United States by name, but his message appeared aimed at the U.S. anti-terrorism campaign—and in particular at Washington's pre-emptive war in Iraq, which was launched without the specific authorization of the United Nations.
John Paul was a vocal critic of the Iraq war, dispatching envoys to Washington and Baghdad to try to prevent hostilities from breaking out and exhorting world leaders that war was not inevitable and was "always a defeat for humanity."
"Because peace is possible ... it is necessary," he said during his homily Thursday.
The New Year's Mass was the last major celebration of the Christmas season for John Paul, who is 83 and suffers from Parkinson's disease, which makes it difficult for him to speak, as well as knee and hip ailments that make it almost impossible for him to walk or stand.
He cut back some of his holiday activities and scrapped two traditional papal events—the ordination of bishops January 6 and baptisms on January 11.
But throughout the Christmas season, he has appeared far stronger than during the series of celebrations in October marking his 25th anniversary as pope. Then, he was unable to deliver many of his homilies and had to have others to read them on his behalf.
The Associated Press
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe/01/01/pope.ny.ap/
Roy Hattersley has argued recently (Religion can't be used as an alibi Roy Hattersley Guardian, May 19 2003) that the state should in certain instances intervene to curtail people's religious liberty; or as he puts it that religion should not be above the law. He gives 3 examples: schools that teach that natural selection is a myth and that the world was created in six days just over four thousand years ago should not be subsidised through taxation, religions which regard homosexuality is a sin should not be exempt from anti-discrimination legislation, and that Muslims and Jews should not be allowed to eat kosher or halal meat because this entails unnecessary pain to animals
In defending this position he cites John Stuart Mill's 'On Liberty', but he misunderstands Mill, and his misunderstanding is so crass as to make one wonder whether he has read Mill at all. In order to explicate Hattersley's Misunderstanding I shall focus on the first of his points, that of the teaching of creationism, since it touches on themes that were especially important to Mill, freedom of speech and freedom in education.
Hattersley says correctly that questions of such moral complexity cannot be answered in a philosophical vacuum and suggests that we should be guided by Mill, I concur. He quotes Mill who said that that while we may be free to harm ourselves correct social conduct consists
'first, in not injuring the interests of one another, or rather certain interests which, either by express legal provision or by tacit understanding, ought to be considered as rights.
He then proceeds as if all that is needed to legitimise state intervention is to demonstrate that other people's interests are injured, thus completely ignoring Mill's very careful qualification of that point, a qualification which Mill clarifies by adding that:
The acts of an individual may be hurtful to others . . . without going to the length of violating any of their constituted rights.
Elsewhere Mill points out that whenever people are in competition with others, for example in job applications or examinations, those who succeed necessarily harm those who do not; and in such cases the state has no right to intervene unless that success has been achieved by means which are against the common interest such as fraud, treachery or force. While Mill saw the harming of another's interest as a necessary condition for state intervention he did not see it is a sufficient condition. Mill wanted to limit state intervention, Hattersley wants to extend it. Mill does indeed prescribe a condition, which makes state intervention necessary, but that condition is not whether my actions harm anybody but whether they violate anybody's rights.
This means that according to Mill the question we should ask in deciding whether the state should intervene in a particular case is not, 'has anybody been harmed?' but 'which rights have been violated?' One example that Hattersley gives of the kind of harm that can be caused by the teaching of creationism is that children might 'spend their adolescence under the impression that their teachers are cranks.' As soon as we ask which right has been violated in this case we realize the absurdity of Hattersley's misunderstanding. For a child cannot have a right not to think of his teachers as eccentric. How could such an absurd right be enforced? Furthermore there is a profound irony in this when we consider the following words:
Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.
And who wrote these words? None other than John Stuart Mill in his essay 'On Liberty' Has Roy Hattersley ever read that work?
Thanks to pioneers like Mill, thinking on the issue of human rights has progressed to the extent that we need no longer think in terms merely of 'tacit understanding' when judging what ought to be considered as a right. Rather we can refer to numerous documents that have received international ratification. Chief among these is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 26 declares:
Everyone has the right to education
There is a universal agreement that such education would have to include basic skills like literacy and numeracy, but there is no attempt to define what kind of education this should be, or to fix any content, it does not insist on a national curriculum, or that the government should provide such education, only that it should be free at least at primary level. This is entirely in accord with the thinking of Mill, who also had very clear ideas on how this goal might be achieved.
If the government would make up its mind [only] to require for every child a good education, it might save itself the trouble of providing one. It might leave to the parents to obtain the education where and how they pleased, and content itself with helping to pay the school fees of the poorer classes of children, and defraying the entire school expenses of those who have no one else to pay for them
He also had clear ideas on what kind of control the government ought to exercise over the content of the curriculum: none.
A general state education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government . . . in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body . . . All attempts by the state to bias the conclusions of its citizens on disputed subjects are evil.
So what are we to make of Hattersley's claim that it is surely self evident that to teach in schools that Eve was created from Adam's rib injures children's interests, because they go into the world believing manifest nonsense. It is not clear whether Hattersley means that holding these beliefs is harmful because it places those who believe them at a social or academic disadvantage or because holding the beliefs is somehow harmful in itself. If the former is the case, and if Hattersley had evidence to support this claim, it would raise some interesting questions about our supposedly tolerant secular society, such as why the state should, in Hattersley's view, act to offset the disadvantages encountered by homosexuals but not those encountered by creationists. However given that the school founded by Vardy in Gateshead is one of the most academically successful in the country, and that Vardy in spite of his beliefs has raised enough money to found them, such evidence is unlikely to be forthcoming. If on the other hand Hattersley believes such beliefs are harmful in themselves, and I think the use of the concept of self-evidence (always an act of desperation) implies that it is, then the question is: do some people have the right to believe what the majority regard as nonsense? Or conversely do people, especially children, have the right to be protected from such views. In answering this question Mill can be of tremendous help, but Hattersley has chosen arbitrarily to ignore the relevant passages in 'On Liberty'
On the question of whether the state has the right to silence minority opinions, Mill says quite bluntly:
We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure it would be an evil still.
This is because:
If the opinion is right (those who dissent from it) are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error.
It might be argued that Mill here is concerned only with political or religious opinion and not with science but this is not so, for when talking of one of the best warranted scientific theories of his age he says
If even the Newtonian philosophy were not permitted to be questioned, mankind could not feel as complete assurance of its truth as they now do. The beliefs which we have most warrant for have no safeguard to rest on but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded.
Mill had very definite views on the philosophy of science but he makes them no part of his argument in On Liberty. When he admits an exception to this general rule that both sides should always be heard in the case of mathematics, he does this not on the grounds of his philosophy of science but simply on the ground of common opinion.
The peculiarity of the evidence of mathematical truths is that all the argument is on one side . . . Even in natural philosophy (science) there is always some other explanation possible of the same facts; some geocentric theory instead of heliocentric, some phlogiston instead of oxygen; and it has to be shown why that other theory cannot be the true one; and until this is shown, and until we know how it is shown, we do not understand the grounds of our opinion.
Mill believed that all science, including mathematics, is empirically based, and that knowledge progresses through increasingly sophisticated forms of induction. The sophistication of scientific induction meant, for Mill, that science so constructed was a superior form of knowledge. But it would also mean that scientific conclusions, such as the grand theory of evolution, which depend on the hypothetico-deductive method, would have a lower epistemic status. However Mill does not here attempt to provide an epistemological argument for the truth of mathematics but rather a socio-statistical one; a thing is disputable if it is disputed, no matter how tiny the number of disputants. Furthermore on Mill's reckoning no one can truly understand the theory of evolution unless he will hear the arguments against it, including the arguments of the creationists.
At this point it may be that someone would argue that creationism is not true science at all, and that therefore creationist theories are not valid alternatives to evolutionary ones. Against this it simply needs to be noted that there is no universally agreed criteria as to what constitutes science. When a teacher brought a case against the state of Arkansas because it would not allow him to teach creationism, the judge ruled that creationism was not true science because it failed the Popperian test of falsifiability. But why? It is certainly not the only philosophy of science, and if the judge had used, say, Feyarabend's anarchistic epistemology or Mill's own sophisticated inductionism, then a completely different outcome might have ensued.
But does Mill refer only to the permitting of debate among adults; are not children too vulnerable to be exposed to views held by the majority to be wrong? Mill did not think so. His approach to education was as we have seen a radical one. But he does not simply say anything goes. What he suggests in a remarkable anticipation of our current system is that the government should be responsible for administering a series of examinations, beginning with a test to see whether a child had learned to read by a suitable age. When a child failed this test its parent should be fined in order to pay for its education. Each child should be examined every year in a broadening range of subjects. Beyond that he advocates something like our current system of GCSE's and A levels in various subjects. Because children have a right to education no parent is free to deny them this right, but by avoiding our system of payment through taxation he hopes to loose education from government control. However by his system of examinations he has effectively put control of the curriculum back into government hands. He seeks to ameliorate his position in the following manner:
To prevent the state from exercising, through these arrangements, an improper influence over opinion, the knowledge required for passing an examination . . . should . . . be confined to facts and positive science exclusively. The examinations on . . . disputed topics should not turn on the truth or falsehood of opinions, but on the matter of fact that such and such an opinion is held, on such grounds, by such authors . . .
To what extent should this apply to science teaching? Clearly some aspects of science are disputed, if only by a minority, and so should not be taught as facts. What this mean in practice is that it is as important for children to understand the grounds on which a particular theory is held as to understand the theory. To make possible this understanding is far more important than to inculcate belief in the theory in question. As Mill says
there is no reasonable objection to examining an atheist in the evidences of Christianity, provided he is not required to profess a belief in them
Nor, it may be added is there any objection to an atheist teaching such evidences. So we can paraphrase Mill and say that there is no reasonable objection to examining a creationist in evolutionary biology (or in a creationist teaching evolutionary biology) so long as he is not required, explicitly or implicitly, to profess an acceptance of the theory. And here is the nub of the matter. No one who does not understand the grand theory of evolution can be said to understand modern biology, and without such an understanding no one can be in a position to rationally favour creationism, on the other hand no one can reject creationism without knowledge of both creationist and evolutionist theory. Therefore there can be no objection to a school teaching creationism alongside evolution, if that is the desire of parents, teachers and governors, providing that such teaching does not dominate the curriculum and prevent pupils from passing examinations set by external bodies. In the case of the schools founded by Peter Vardy this is very emphatically not the case.
Hattersley in presenting his understanding of creationism does not demonstrate the knowledge that would enable him to reject the theory. No creationist teaches that the world was created 4,000 years ago or that natural selection is a myth. Amongst creationists there are a range of positions on the age of the earth, young earth creationists teach that the world is between 6,000 and 10,000 years old. Creationists do not argue against natural selection, which is an observable phenomenon, but do argue that it is in itself inadequate to account for the diversity of animal species and in particular the distinctions peculiar to human beings. All Hattersley has done is to demonstrate the mindless prejudice he professes to abhor.
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20030326-122321-4664r
By Kathy A. Gambrell
UPI White House Reporter
Published 3/26/2003 5:31 PM
WASHINGTON, March 26 (UPI) -- President George W. Bush arrived Wednesday afternoon at Camp David where he and British Prime Minister Tony Blair will hold talks on humanitarian relief and post-war reconstruction efforts inside Iraq.
The president and Secretary of State Colin Powell will hold a series of meetings with Blair at the presidential retreat in the Maryland mountains on Thursday. Blair was scheduled to have dinner with them before beginning talks, the White House said.
The two leaders are to hold a joint press conference from Camp David at 11 a.m. EST Thursday.
Great Britain has been the United States' closest ally and largest coalition partner. Blair supported Bush in the effort to disarm Saddam despite intense political pressure from members of his own party in Parliament and a number of large anti-war demonstrations.
The discussions get underway as coalition forces in Iraq face their toughest opposition yet. As blinding sandstorms raged across Iraq Wednesday, U.S.-led forces continued to push slowly toward Baghdad against unexpectedly stiff resistance, with the prospect of even tougher encounters as they neared the Iraqi capital.
Bush left Washington early Wednesday for MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla., headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, which is running the invasion of Iraq. He warned that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's "day of reckoning" was near and vowed that the United States would be relentless in its pursuit of victory as military forces continued their push across the desert toward Baghdad.
"We cannot know the duration of this war, but we are prepared for the battle ahead. We cannot predict the final day of the Iraqi regime, but I can assure you -- and I assure the long-suffering people of Iraq -- there will be a day of reckoning for the Iraqi regime, and that day is drawing near," Bush said.
Speaking in his most passionate and fiery tone since the start of the war one week ago, Bush addressed hundreds of cheering and applauding military personnel and their families, along with U.S. and coalition commanders.
"Millions of Americans are proud of our military, and so am I," Bush said.
Aboard Air Force One, en route to Florida, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer told reporters that the president would say that the war was running ahead of schedule, but at the last minute that assessment was dropped from Bush's speech.
The change came as defense officials rejected criticism that they had underestimated Saddam's forces -- in particular the Republican Guard and his paramilitary unit, Fedayeen Saddam -- a militia whose name literally translates as "those ready to sacrifice themselves for Saddam."
Meanwhile, British troops of the 7th Armored Brigade -- who earned the nickname Desert Rats during World War II -- were settling in around Basra where their path into the city was blocked by Iraqi irregulars. An uprising by some of the 1.5 million residents against Saddam Hussein's militias -- first reported by British military intelligence -- was said to be continuing Wednesday, although there was no independent confirmation.
A British Broadcasting Corp. reporter embedded with British marines south of Basra said that a column of Iraqi armor, as many as 120 vehicles strong, had emerged from the city earlier in the day, and was being attacked by aircraft and artillery.
Washington, the United Nations and the European Union are thinking beyond the collapse of the Saddam regime to Iraq's recovery and reconstruction. Humanitarian aid -- and the question of who is going to supply what -- is the subject of intense negotiation at the United Nations and the EU headquarters in Brussels.
The White House on Tuesday said the United States was providing $105 million to international aid agencies to help Iraqis secure food, water and medical aid as coalition forces continue their effort to oust the regime of Saddam Hussein.
"Protecting innocent civilians is a central commitment of our war plan. Our enemy in this war is the Iraqi regime, not the people who have suffered under it. As we bring justice to a dictator, today we started bringing humanitarian aid in large amounts to an oppressed land," Bush said at MacDill.
The administration's move to provide assistance for civilians caught in the war zone is similar to efforts to provide help during the conflict in Afghanistan, a so-called "butter and bullets" campaign.
The World Food Program would receive $60 million of the total, while $21 million would go to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, $10 million to the International Committee of the Red Cross and $8 million to the International Organization of Migration, the White House said.
There have been problems moving humanitarian assistance into the region. Umm Qasr, the only seaport along Iraq's southern coast, was only secured by allied forces on Wednesday. Having seized the port, coalition forces swept the harbor for mines after two Iraqi tugboats carrying explosives were interdicted. A British vessel, the Sir Galahad, stocked with food and approximately 1,500 tons of water, was ready to dock. Australia sent two more ships, each filled with 50,000 tons of wheat, which were standing by, waiting to unload.
The president this week asked Congress to approve a $74.7 billion war budget sent to Capitol Hill as a supplemental appropriations request. The request includes $53 billion for operational activities such as moving troops into the region, returning them home and replenishing supplies and munitions.
Another $8 billion would go toward international operations and aid to countries such as Jordan, Israel, Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt, Afghanistan, the Philippines and Colombia. Of that figure, $3.5 billion would pay for humanitarian relief, reconstruction and repairs to damaged oil fields.
Bush delivered his speech at MacDill as coalition forces staged an intensified bombing campaign of Baghdad and hit Iraq's main television station and key communication facilities. The military action came a day after coalition officials said they were poised to seize the capital despite a severe sandstorm, and were engaged in one of the largest firefights of the conflict so far.
Bush said that in the early days of the mission, dubbed Operation Iraqi Freedom, U.S. Special Forces helped secure airfields, bridges and oil fields. He said that American pilots and cruise missiles had struck vital military targets with "lethal precision" and destroyed a base in northern Iraq suspected of being used for chemical warfare.
"We have moved over 200 miles to the north, toward Iraq's capital, in the last three days. And the dictator's major Republican Guard units are now under direct and intense attack. Day by day, Saddam Hussein is losing his grip on Iraq. Day by day, the Iraqi people are closer to freedom," the president said.
Bush paid tribute to members of the coalition forces killed during combat, saying that people across the country were praying their families and loved ones find comfort and grace in their sorrow. Twenty-two U.S. soldiers have been killed and 14 are reported missing.
The president then offered a prayer for them. "We pray that God will bless and receive each of the fallen. And we thank God that liberty found such brave defenders," he said.
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20030326-122321-4664r
During three weeks in September 1940 known as 'The Blitz', about 10,000 high-explosive bombs were dropped by the Nazi Luftwffe on the London region. On October 10th St. Paul's cathedral received it's only direct hit of the war... but the bomb came through the roof and destroyed only the high altar.
The altar in churches has nothing whatsoever to do with Christianity. See if you can find Jesus or his early followers telling anyone to use altars. Why should anyone need an altar to communicate with God or his son? We have the holy spirit! Pagan altars were wrongly incorporated into early Christianity (as so much else such as the priesthood, Mary worship and changing the sabbath to Sunday) by the Roman Emperor Constantine.
http://www.observer.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,856064,00.html
'The most accessible entrance into the Blairs' spirit world of paganism, spiritualism, pseudo-science and quackery is through a chat with Cherie's 'homeopathic dowser healer' - one Jack Temple, aged 86. Temple is the possessor of a 'Neolithic stone circle', which, he assured me, captures the healing energies of the stars, sun and moon and holds them for the benefit of his paying customers. He discovered the 'magic' stones in Pembrokeshire and transported them in two lorries to his home in Pyrford, near Woking, Surrey.
'I'm sorry,' I interrupted. 'The local authority and the National Trust allowed you to run off with an ancient stone circle?'
'The stones weren't in a circle,' he explained. 'They had been cleared so the field could be worked. They were dumped in a ditch and a farmer sold them to me.' 'I see. A farmer said a load of old rubble was once a Stone Age religious site and you paid ready money to get your hands on it. How did you know the stones were genuine stones, so to speak?'
An irritated note entered Temple's voice. 'I dowsed them with my magic pendulum, of course. I made the amazing discovery that each of the 16 stones relieved stress in different parts of the body - the muscles, the brain and so on.' After he moved the stones to Surrey, Temple went to the garden centre and used his pendulum to divine the aura of the herb and alpines section. The trial of the plants was merciless. He found only wild strawberries had the strength to 'contain nature's energy generated by the stone circle'.
Temple duly planted his circle with strawberries. He will sell you a small packet of their dried leaves for £10 (plus £1 p&p). It's a bargain, as Cherie Blair knows. Temple said in his autobiography Medicine Man : 'I believe I've helped the lame to walk, the barren to conceive, and the sad to smile. I've been able to reflate the lungs of children previously condemned to a life constricted by asthma. I've even seen the bald pates of middle-aged and elderly men begin to spring hair growth again.'
Don't mock him. Fergie and, inevitably, the late Princess Di have acclaimed him as a healing genius. Temple is happy to allow everyone to share the inner harmony of royalty and the Blairs. For £85 he will sell you a pile of stones and instructions on how to lay them out in the garden. (This time he doesn't mention the cost of the post and packing, which I suspect will be steep.)
Cherie Blair was introduced to the doddering dowser by Sylvia and Carole Caplin. Sylvia, 67, is a former ballet dancer turned spiritualist. On 11 November, the Daily Mail published an extraordinary piece. According to a former client, Caplin Senior 'can bring the light down' and open channels with the dead. Mrs Blair regularly visits the mystic's £500,000 house in a gated park in Dorking. It, too, is filled with stones. 'There was a particularly active period in the summer when Sylvia was channelling for Cherie over two or three times a week, with almost daily contact between them,' the Mail reported. 'There were times when Cherie's faxes ran to 10 pages.'
This can't possibly be true, I thought. I phoned Downing Street and asked if they denied the story. The press officer promised to call back, but never did. I checked if the Mail had received a complaint. The paper hadn't heard a squeak of protest. I think we can take the silence as a confirmation.
Caplin's daughter is the former soft-porn model who became Mrs and Mr Blair's style guru and confidante in 1994. She has been a lady in waiting at the New Labour court since. Her boyfriend is Peter Foster, an Australian fraudster with a criminal record that goes back to 1983. After a week of stupendous lies, the Blairs admitted Foster had somehow secured them two flats in Bristol at £69,000 off the market price - or about three times the annual pay of a fire officer.
The mother is as alarming as her daughter's crooked lover. Cherie evidently believes Caplin senior is in touch with the other side, and Caplin may well believe she can natter with the dead herself. None of her clients has suggested she played on their fear and credulity. But, so what? Whether she is a sincere fool or a sly fraud doesn't matter. A con's a con whatever the mental state of the con woman. What spiritualists say is a lie whether they know it or not.
Modern spiritualism began in 1848 when two sisters from New York State announced that they had received coded tapping messages from the ghost of a murdered peddler. The scam was a great success. For 40 years Margaret and Katherine Fox made a good living from a fraud which inspired mediums the world over. At the end of their lives the Foxes admitted that the knocking sounds seance-goers had heard were made by Margaret - who had mastered the knack of snapping her toes. Their belated honesty did no good and spiritualism continued to flourish.
Given its history, why does Cherie believe it? Well she is a Catholic and her husband is an Anglo-Catholic, and if you can believe that wine and a wafer are the blood and body of Christ you can believe anything. Or, indeed, everything. Until now, there has been an averting of well-bred eyes from the superstitions of our creepy PM and his gullible wife.
A year ago, the Times printed the following account of what they did on their summer holidays at the luxurious Maroma Hotel on Mexico's Caribbean coast. The Blairs visited a 'Temazcal', a steam bath enclosed in a brick pyramid. It was dusk and they had stripped down to their swimming costumes. Inside, they met Nancy Aguilar, a new-age therapist. She told them that the pyramid was a Mayan womb in which they would be reborn. The Blairs saw the shapes of animals in the steam and experienced 'inner-feelings and visions'. They smeared each other with melon, papaya and mud from the jungle, and then let out a primal scream of purifying agony. No one followed-up the Times's scoop - deference is not as dead as some people would have you think.
When the Blairs moved into Downing Street, a feng shui expert rearranged the furniture at Number 10. Cherie wears a 'magic pendant' known as the BioElectric Shield, which is filled with 'a matrix of specially cut quartz crystals' that surround the wearer with 'a cocoon of energy' and ward off evil forces. (It was given to her by Hillary Clinton, another political spouse who combines