Sunday, September 10, 2006

CHRISTIAN EVANGELISM NOW A HATE CRIME IN BRITAIN

How long will it be before Christianity becomes illegal in Britain? This is no longer the utterly absurd and offensive question that on first blush it would appear to be. An evangelical Christian campaigner, Stephen Green was arrested and charged last weekend with using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour. So what was this behaviour? Merely trying peacefully to hand out leaflets at a gay rally in Cardiff. So what was printed on those leaflets that was so threatening, abusive or insulting that it attracted the full force of the law? Why, none other than the majestic words of the 1611 King James Bible.

The problem was that they were those bits of the Bible which forbid homosexuality. The leaflets also urged homosexuals to "turn from your sins and you will be saved". But to the secular priests of the human rights culture, the only sin is to say that homosexuality is a sin.

Admittedly, Mr Green is not everyone's cup of tea; other Christians regard him as extreme. But our society is now so upside-down that, by doing nothing more than upholding a fundamental tenet of Christianity, he was treated like a criminal. And yet at the same time, the police are still studiously refusing to act against Islamic zealots abusing British freedom to preach hatred and incitement against the West.

Prejudice:

The Bible is the moral code that underpins our civilisation. Yet the logic of the police action against Mr Green surely leads ultimately to the inescapable conclusion that the Bible itself is "hate speech" and must be banned. This bizarre state of affairs has arisen thanks to our human rights culture which automatically champions minorities against the majority. As a result, no one can say anything disobliging about a minority without being accused of prejudice or discrimination.

The problem for Christianity is that it holds that homosexuality is wrong. This, however, it is no longer allowed to say because it treats a minority practice as sinful. So it can no longer uphold a central tenet of its own faith without being accused of prejudice. This dilemma is currently tearing apart the Church of England itself. But it is also turning our whole notion of justice on its head. Author Lynette Burrows received a warning from the Metropolitan Police merely for suggesting that gay people did not make ideal adoptive parents. The former leader of the Muslim Council of Britain, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, also had his collar felt by police after he said that homosexuality was harmful.

Notably, in his case the matter was swiftly dropped. If there's one thing that terrifies our PC police even more than being called homophobic, it's being called Islamophobic - even though Islamic fundamentalism poses a real threat to the human rights of gay people.

If this wasn't all so frightening, it would be hilarious. Christians, by contrast, get very different treatment. An elderly evangelical preacher, Harry Hammond, was convicted of a public order offence after he held up a poster calling for an end to homosexuality, lesbianism and immorality. Although he had been the victim of a physical attack when a crowd poured soil and water over him, he alone was prosecuted.

And Lancashire pensioners Joe and Helen Roberts were interrogated by police for 80 minutes about their 'homophobic' views after they had merely asked their local council to display Christian literature alongside gay rights leaflets in civic buildings.

Bullying:

Christianity is fast becoming the creed that dare not speak its name. It is being written out of the national script by ideologues seeking to hasten its disappearance. Yesterday, the Mayor of London Ken Livingstone said in a radio interview that Britain was "no longer a Christian country" because people no longer went to church. Local authorities and government bodies are systematically bullying Christianity out of existence by refusing to fund Christian voluntary groups on the grounds that to be Christian means that they are not committed to 'diversity'. Thus local and central government refused to replicate the vocational training provided by the Highfields Happy Hens Centre in Derbyshire for young offenders and pupils excluded from school despite its impressive record of success, simply because it was run with a clear Christian ethos.

Norfolk council objected to the inclusion of the word 'Christian' in the constitution of Barnabas House in King's Lynn, Norfolk, which houses homeless young men. And the Housing Corporation, the major funder of Romford YMCA in Essex which looks after hundreds of needy young people, objected to the fact that only Christians were board members - which meant, it said, that the YMCA was not capable of 'diversity', even though it was open to all faiths and none. The 'diversity' agenda, in other words, is a fig-leaf for an attack on Christianity.

And to cap it all, we can no longer rely on our future monarch to hold the line, since Prince Charles has said that when he becomes King he will no longer be Defender of the Faith but "defender of faith". But Christianity is still the official religion of this country. All its institutions, its history and its culture are suffused with it; Britain would lose its identity, its values and its cohesion without it. But minority rights are now being wielded against it like a wrecking ball.

What started as a commendable desire to ban hatred of the gay minority has morphed into a hatred of the Christian majority. Behaviour which was previously considered to transgress the moral norms of the Bible has now instead become the norm - and it is biblical values that are treated as beyond the pale of acceptable behaviour. This is no accident. The sacred doctrine of human rights - which explicitly sets itself up as the religion for a godless age - is the means by which secularism is steadily attacking the Christian roots of our civilisation, on the basis that religion is inherently unenlightened, prejudiced and divisive.

Christianity has been dethroned as this country's governing creed on the basis that equality demands equal status for minority faiths and secularism. As a result, it is being marginalised as no more than a quaint cultural curiosity.

Offensive:

It is a process before which the Church of England has long been on its knees, going with the flow of moral and cultural collapse in accordance with the doctrine of multiculturalism - and then wondering why its churches are so empty, while those of uncompromising evangelicals such as Stephen Green are packed to the rafters. As a result, Christianity is being steadily removed from the public sphere.

Various councils have banned Christmas on the grounds that it is "too Christian" and therefore "offensive" to people of other faiths, and are replacing it with meaningless "winter festivals". This attack on Christianity is not merely something that seems straight out of Alice In Wonderland. It is not merely a threat to freedom of speech and religious expression. It is a fundamental onslaught on the national identity and bedrock values of this country - and as such will destroy those freedoms which Christianity itself first created.

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OFFICIAL TERRORISM DENIAL

By now, most of you have probably heard about the "crazy" in San Francisco who drove his black Honda SUV into 14 people, killing one. This wasn't an isolated incident last Tuesday, the unfortunates crossing at a single intersection, for instance. Twenty-nine year old Omeed Aziz Popal, just recently returned from Afghanistan, first struck and killed a man in the early afternoon before heading back out somewhat later to continue his spree. (See here)

There is no doubt that what Popal did was deliberate. One witness described hearing the Afghani scream "I'm a terrorist, I don't care" as San Francisco police led him away after his arrest. But according to a SF police spokesman, the series of attacks was not an act of terrorism, the same claim later affirmed by the department's command staff. No one has been able to answer, however, how such a conclusion could have been arrived at so quickly.

If this sounds eerily familiar, it is. Just last March, an Iranian immigrant drove an SUV into a crowd of people at the University of North Carolina, running over nine people. Despite the fact that this man boasted that "Allah gives permission in the Quran for the followers of Allah to attack those who have raged war against them..." and later sent a letter to a NC television station to reiterate his claim, Solomon Bradman, chief executive officer of the Miami-based Security Solutions International, commented that this attack didn't really look like an act of terrorism since, "he did a lousy job of it." (See here)

Maybe I didn't get the memo, but I didn't know that certain standards that had to be met - aside from the perp actually admitting his motive and his religion - in order to simply blow off an action that has all the signs of being an actual act of Islamofacist terrorism, with a lame comment. Was the benchmark somehow set on 9-11 that we have to have thousands of people die before it's actually called what it really is?

How about the attack last month by a lone gunman at the Jewish Federation Center in Seattle? I'll give you just one guess as to what the religion of this Pakistani is (HINT: Not a Quaker). Naveed Afzal Haq, whose father is the founding member of an Islamic center near Seattle, is.that's right, Muslim. Daddy's center is affiliated with Saudi-financed Wahhabist organizations, but we'll just ignore this additional bit of revealing info. The FBI has decided, instead, to call this incident a "hate crime," not an act of terrorism, adding that there was "nothing to indicate [that] he is part of a larger organization." (See here) I guess I missed the memo on this too, because apparently you must belong to a group (like a chess club?) in order to be declared a "terrorist."

Now I'm not a terrorism expert, by any means. I'd like to think that I can leave these sort of things to the experts to sort out, but there's something very unsettling when law enforcement officials and other governmental agencies who are supposed to be paying attention to all of this, connecting the dots if you will, try to instead play the "lone gunman" theory.

Daniel Pipes of the New York Sun calls these sudden acts of violence "Sudden Jihad Syndrome," a phrase he coined after Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar decided to run down people at the University of NC (See here).

Sudden Jihad Syndrome is certainly a catchy little phrase, but let me narrow it down to what it really is. Islamofacist terrorism, and the people who are supposed to be protecting us from all of this had better start acknowledging that that is indeed what it is.

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Oppressive "vilification" laws in the Australian State of Victoria

Below is an excerpt from a parliamentary speech delivered 7 September 2006 by Australian Senator Mitch Fifield. He was speaking about Mr Bruce Smith (1851-1937), a committed libertarian. The section in which Senator Fifield criticises Victoria's Racial and Religious Tolerance Act (2001) has been extracted

What disturbs me even more is the restriction of freedom of speech in Victoria as a result of the Racial and Religious Tolerance Act 2001. No-one should ever condone racial vilification. It is completely unacceptable in Australian society to vilify anyone on the basis of their racial background. It was a desire to protect members of our community that prompted the bill. Anti-Semitism was particularly in the minds of the proponents and the authors of the bill, but the act has gone too far. It limits freedom of religious expression, freedom of speech and freedom of conscience in a way that is totally unacceptable in a liberal, pluralistic democracy. Religious vilification should be condemned, but the difficulties of legislating against religious vilification have become evident.

Two Christian pastors have been found guilty by the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal of making fun of Muslim beliefs and practices. The crime was to quote the Koran and evoke laughter from the audience. No-one suggested that the pastors were quoting the Koran incorrectly, just that the response to quoting passages from the Koran was laughter. In Victoria today, laughter amounts to religious vilification. The core business of clerics is to advocate why they believe-to advocate their world view and why their truth is the right one. Of necessity, this means saying why you believe that another's belief system is flawed. The battle of ideas, the battle of world views and the battle of beliefs is at the heart of what makes us a pluralistic society. Pluralism is not the housing of beliefs in silos; it is the interaction of those ideas and the tolerance of those ideas. But tolerance does not mean a denial of contestability. All ideas in our society should be contestable.

But there is worse to come. A convicted Wiccan paedophile serving time in jail has used the religious vilification provisions of the legislation to pursue the Salvation Army for allegedly vilifying his Wiccan religious beliefs. The paedophile voluntarily enrolled in an alpha course-a church-run course to explain Christianity. The crime? Those conducting the course did not speak well of witches, astrologers and occultists. TheWiccan was unsuccessful in his action, but the fact that this matter could even go to a directions hearing means that the laws are fundamentally flawed. I again turn to Bob Carr for assistance. He had this to say about such laws:

As they are used in practice, religious vilification laws can undermine the very freedom they seek to protect-freedom of thought, conscience and belief.

This is yet another example of meddling legislation. The solution to the articulation of poor ideas, stupid ideas, offensive ideas, is not to gag those articulating them. The solution is to rebut them with good ideas- the sort of legitimate exchange of ideas that people like Bruce Smith spent their lives engaging in. I fear that I am giving Bob Carr too much credit, but I will give him the final word on this particular piece of legislation. He said, `Leave these matters to the commonsense of the Australian people.'

I congratulate the state Liberal leader, Ted Baillieu, and the shadow Attorney-General, Andrew Macintosh, for their stands on these issues of freedom. The Victorian opposition is committed to repealing the bill of rights and to reviewing the religious vilification provisions of the Racial and Religious Tolerance Act. Bruce Smith would be proud. We need to be vigilant and resolute and reject being told how to live our lives. It is always time to stand up for individual freedoms, liberty and equal opportunity. It is time to stand against these new nanny states. It is time to revive the spirit of Bruce Smith.

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