Category: Religion

I Missed this on Tuesday

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Incumbent Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes was soundly defeated in the primary by Ken Thompson.

The reason that I have an interest in what would ordinarily be a very local race is because there is a huge Haredim (ultra-orthodox Jewish) community, particularly the Satmar, and many of the leading rabbis threw their support behind him.

When juxtaposed with the very soft touch applied by to the Hynes’ office toward the Orthodox community, the implication of an electoral quid pro quo is hard to avoid.

Thompson is saying that they will have a, “DA’s office, where there will be one standard of justice for all, no matter where you come from, no matter how much money you have,” which I think is a pretty obvious shot across the bow regarding the pattern of aggressive threats toward witnesses in the Haredi community.

As an aside, I think that Hynes had an inkling that he might lose, because we have some credible allegations that one of his assistants, the, “scandal-ridden A.D.A. Michael Vecchione,” has been removing files from the office for the past few days, allegedly to prevent Thompson from reviewing them and referring them to the Bar or a court of law.

If Thompson can break the Omerta of the Orthodox community, it would be a very good thing.

Deep Thought

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When a person commits a sin and does not turn in repentance, when that person forgets the sin, the Holy One remembers it.

When a person fulfills a commandment by doing a good deed, the Holy One remembers it.

When a person commits a sin and later turns in repentance, remembering the sin, the Holy One grants atonement, and forgets the sin.

When a person fulfills a commandment and ius constantly filled with self-praise because of it, the Holy One forgets it.

What a person forgets, God Remembers; what a person remembers, God forgets.

—Rebbe Shmelke of Nikolsberg

This was a note included in the margins of our Machzor*, and was pointed out during Rosh Hashanah services today by the Rabbi.

It needs to be shared.

*A specialized version of a Jewish prayer book that is intended specifically for Jewish High Holidays services. Link

And They Want to Make this Motherf%$#er Head of Homeland Security?

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It turns out that the New York Police Department, under the direction of its chief, Ray Kelly, designated mosques as terrorist organizations so that they could engage in unfettered surveillance:

The New York Police Department has secretly labeled entire mosques as terrorist organizations, a designation that allows police to use informants to record sermons and spy on imams, often without specific evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

Designating an entire mosque as a terrorism enterprise means that anyone who attends prayer services there is a potential subject of an investigation and fair game for surveillance.

Since the 9/11 attacks, the NYPD has opened at least a dozen “terrorism enterprise investigations” into mosques, according to interviews and confidential police documents. The TEI, as it is known, is a police tool intended to help investigate terrorist cells and the like.

Many TEIs stretch for years, allowing surveillance to continue even though the NYPD has never criminally charged a mosque or Islamic organization with operating as a terrorism enterprise.

So, not only dit Ray Kelly and his thugs in blue routinely violate people’s civil rights, they did not catch anyone.

It gets worse:

The NYPD did not limit its operations to collecting information on those who attended the mosques or led prayers. The department sought also to put people on the boards of New York’s Islamic institutions to fill intelligence gaps.

One confidential NYPD document shows police wanted to put informants in leadership positions at mosques and other organizations, including the Arab American Association of New York in Brooklyn, a secular social-service organization.

………

Before the NYPD could target mosques as terrorist groups, it had to persuade a federal judge to rewrite rules governing how police can monitor speech protected by the First Amendment.

The rules stemmed from a 1971 lawsuit, dubbed the Handschu case after lead plaintiff Barbara Handschu, over how the NYPD spied on protesters and liberals during the Vietnam War era.

………

NYPD lawyers proposed a new tactic, the TEI, that allowed officers to monitor political or religious speech whenever the “facts or circumstances reasonably indicate” that groups of two or more people were involved in plotting terrorism or other violent crime.

The judge rewrote the Handschu rules in 2003. In the first eight months under the new rules, the NYPD’s Intelligence Division opened at least 15 secret terrorism enterprise investigations, documents show. At least 10 targeted mosques.

Doing so allowed police, in effect, to treat anyone who attends prayer services as a potential suspect. Sermons, ordinarily protected by the First Amendment, could be monitored and recorded.

………

The NYPD believed the tactics were necessary to keep the city safe, a view that sometimes put it at odds with the FBI.

In August 2003, Cohen asked the FBI to install eavesdropping equipment inside a mosque called Masjid al-Farooq, including its prayer room.

Al-Farooq had a long history of radical ties. Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian sheik who was convicted of plotting to blow up New York City landmarks, once preached briefly at Al-Farooq. Invited preachers raged against Israel, the United States and the Bush administration’s war on terror.

One of Cohen’s informants said an imam from another mosque had delivered $30,000 to an al-Farooq leader, and the NYPD suspected the money was for terrorism.

But Amy Jo Lyons, the FBI assistant special agent in charge for counterterrorism, refused to bug the mosque. She said the federal law wouldn’t permit it.

The NYPD made other arrangements. [NYPD deputy commissioner for intelligence and former CIA operative David] Cohen’s informants began to carry recording devices into mosques under investigation. They hid microphones in wristwatches and the electronic key fobs used to unlock car doors.

Even under a TEI, a prosecutor and a judge would have to approve bugging a mosque. But the informant taping was legal because New York law allows any party to record a conversation, even without consent from the others. Like the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge, the NYPD never demonstrated in court that al-Farooq was a terrorist enterprise but that didn’t stop the police from spying on the mosques for years.

Let’s be clear here, not only should Ray Kelly not he made head of DHS, he, and anyone who participated in this, should have their security clearances pulled.

They should be pulled immediately, and forever.

Fabulous!

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Pastor Scott Lively, a homophobic bigot who was one of the Americans involved in drafting, and lobbying for Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” bill, has has been sued in court for crimes against humanity:

A federal judge on Wednesday denied a motion to dismiss a crimes against humanity case brought against evangelical pastor Scott Lively of Massachusetts.

Lively is accused of violating international law by inciting the persecution of LGBT individuals in Uganda. The lawsuit was filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) on behalf of Sexual Minorities of Uganda (SMUG) in 2012.

“We are gratified that the court recognized the persecution and the gravity of the danger faced by our clients as a result of Scott Lively’s actions,” CCR Attorney Pam Spees said. “Lively’s single-minded campaign has worked to criminalize their very existence, strip away their fundamental rights and threaten their physical safety.”

The lawsuit alleged that Lively aided the persecution of LGBT people in Uganda over the past decade and inspired notorious anti-LGBT legislation known as the “Kill the Gays” bill.

Here’s hoping that they take him for all he’s worth.

H/t BS at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Not a Great Day for Jews

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It is Tisha B’Av, the 9th day of the Hebrew month Av, and a small subset of the nasty bits of Jewish history follows:

  1. The report of the spies from Canaan, resulting in the people of Israel spending 40 Years in the Desert.
  2. The destruction of the 1st Temple.
  3. The destruction of the 2nd Temple.
  4. The Romans razed Betar, killing 100,000 Jews.
  5. The Romans plowed the temple mount.
  6. The start of the 1st Crusade.  (You see it as a coming together of Christendom.  I see it as a pogrom with years of murder and rape.)
  7. The expulsion of Jews from England.
  8. The expulsion of Jews from France.
  9. The expulsion of Jews from Spain.
  10. Germany entered the WW I. (Can be legitimately claimed to have directly led to the Shoah)
  11. Formal approval of the “Final Solution” by the Nazis in 1941.
  12. Deportations to Treblinka from the Warsaw Ghetto begin in 1942.

Excuse me while I find something sturdy to cover my head with.

    Oh, Crap

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    Have you heard about MERS?

    I don’t mean the fraudulent legal figleaf known as the Mortgage Electronic Registration System that is a plague upon home-owners, I am instead referring an actual plague to Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, a SARS like infectious disease with a 55% fatality rate centered in Saudi Arabia.

    Discussions of this disease have been bouncing around the epidemiology world for a while, there have only been about 80 confirmed cases, but in a couple of months millions of pilgrims will be going to Saudi Arabia as a part of the Hajj:

    When the Black Death exploded in Arabia in the 14th century, killing an estimated third of the population, it spread across the Islamic world via infected religious pilgrims. Today, the Middle East is threatened with a new plague, one eponymously if not ominously named the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS-CoV, or MERS for short). This novel coronavirus was discovered in Jordan in March 2012, and as of June 26, there have been 77 laboratory-confirmed infections, 62 of which have been in Saudi Arabia; 34 of these Saudi patients have died.

    Although the numbers — so far — are small, the disease is raising anxiety throughout the region. But officials in Saudi Arabia are particularly concerned.

    This fall, millions of devout Muslims will descend upon Mecca, Medina, and Saudi Arabia’s holy sites in one of the largest annual migrations in human history. In 2012, approximately 6 million pilgrims came through Saudi Arabia to perform the rituals associated with umrah, and this number is predicted to rise in 2013. Umrah literally means “to visit a populated place,” and it’s the very proximity that has health officials so worried. In Mecca alone, millions of pilgrims will fulfill the religious obligation of circling the Kaaba. And having a large group of people together in a single, fairly confined space threatens to turn the holiest site in Islam into a massive petri dish.

    The disease is still mysterious. Little is understood about how it is transmitted and even less regarding its origins. But we do know that MERS is deadly, with a mortality rate of about 55 percent — a remarkably higher lethality than that posed by its close cousin, the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus, which in 2003 terrified travelers across the globe but posed a fatality rate of only 9.6 percent. The MERS coronavirus is new to our species, so mild and asymptomatic infections seem to be rare, but the human immune response to infection is itself so extreme that it can prove deadly in some cases.

    All this is going on while a Dutch lab is claiming rights to the species genome, which is crippling research on the disease.

    This has all the hallmarks of a public health catastrophe.

    Bigotry is as Bigotry Does

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    It appears that the Southern Baptist convention does not support the Boy Scouts if they do not allow them to be bigots:

    Reaction to the Boy Scouts of America’s decision yesterday to allow openly gay scouts but continue the ban on gay adult leaders is drawing intense reaction from all sides.

    ………

    Richard Land, an executive with the Southern Baptist Convention, said he expected many churches to quit sponsoring scout troops. “Frankly, I can’t imagine a Southern Baptist pastor who would continue to allow his church to sponsor a Boy Scout troop under these new rules,” Land, president of the convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, told the Baptist Press news service. “I predict there will be a mass exodus of Southern Baptists and other conservative Christians from the Boy Scouts.

    Not “approving” of homosexuality may not necessarily make you a homophobic bigot, but demanding the right to what is a public accommodation on the basis of your disapproval does make you a homophobic bigot.

    In the case of the Southern Baptist Convention, I am not surprised by this. Their bigotry dates back to their origins as a schismatic movement dedicated to promulgating slavery.

    This is a Shanda Before the Goyim

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    A tool to run comparisons

    Israel has the highest proportion of its population living in poverty of any OECD nation:

    Israel has the highest rate of poverty of all developed countries, according to a report released by the 33-nation Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on Wednesday.

     The OECD found that Israel’s poverty rate stands as almost 21%.

     It also put Israel at fifth place among countries with the widest gaps between rich and poor, after Chile, Mexico, Turkey and the United States, while Iceland, Slovenia, Norway and Denmark were the most egalitarian societies.

    Israel has been practicing Thatcher style economics, even the Labour Party, for the past few decades, which could explain this.

    I’m also wondering how much of this number is driven by the growing number of Heridi Jews in Israel. They are about 10% of the population, and are disproportionately: Over half the Heridim live in poverty, and are on government assistance, as versus about 15% of the general population.

    Much of this differential is actually an artifact of poverty by choice. Many in this community prefer to remain on the dole, so that they can study Torah.

    Of course, there is no requirement for someone not to work in order to study Torah.

    Maimonides was a noted doctor, Rashi was a vintner, and the Baal Shem Tov was an inn keeper.

    I do not know of anyone of this generation with the chops of those folks. Get a f%$#ing job.

    And the Award for Institutional Corruption In an African Institution Goes To………

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    The Catholic Diocese of Uganda which has suspended a priest for reporting child rape:

    He is a celebrity across eastern and central Africa, a gospel music star known to many as the “Dancing Priest.” But for years he also was a keeper of painful secrets — his own and many others’.

    In going public, Anthony Musaala has forced the Roman Catholic Church in Uganda to confront a problem it had insisted didn’t exist. And he may stir a debate far beyond Africa’s most Catholic of countries.

    The Ugandan priest has been suspended indefinitely by the archbishop of Kampala for exposing what he calls an open secret: Sex abuse in the Catholic Church is a problem in Africa as well as in Western Europe and North America.

    The African Catholic Church is fast-growing, pious and traditional. As the church elsewhere forks out billions of dollars to compensate the child sex abuse victims of priests, few African Catholics have questioned the assumption, voiced recently by Ghanaian Cardinal Peter Turkson, that the African church is purer than its counterpart in the West, which is regarded as secular and permissive.

    It’s not more pure, says Musaala. He says he has the evidence to prove it.

    “The Vatican turns a blind eye because it doesn’t want to be embarrassed about this blooming church. But I think it’s time we had the truth,” Musaala says.

    In March, he wrote to the archbishop of Kampala, Cyprian Lwanga, about priests who fathered children, kept secret wives or abused girls or boys, and called for a debate on marriage for priests.

    One of the cases of abuse he cited involved himself. He was one of numerous boys sexually abused at 16, he says, by Catholic brothers at one of Uganda’s best boarding schools. He also alleged several other cases of child sex abuse in his letter.

    “Wherever you go, people know about this. It’s like an open secret. People know. Nothing is ever done,” said Musaala in an interview.

    The letter was leaked to the news media. And in response, Lwanga suspended Musaala, saying his statements stirred up contempt for the Catholic Church and damaged the morale of believers.

    Later in the month, Lwanga acknowledged that abuses had taken place, apologized to victims and set up an internal inquiry. But he did not backtrack on Musaala’s unpaid suspension.

    Lwanga’s limited concession came after South African Cardinal Wilfrid Napier of Durban said in a BBC interview that he had dealt with cases of child sex abuse, which were handled by the church internally, and not referred to the police. He suggested that the perpetrators weren’t criminals and needed counseling.

    ………

    Indeed, after Musaala’s letter became public, a Catholic government minister close to the archbishop advised him to apologize. “He said, ‘You spent a lot of time in England and you have been here for 17 years, but you’ve never quite understood the kind of environment in which we live here,'” Musaala said in a telephone interview. “‘And the kind of things you are trying to say just do not fit well in this kind of environment.'”

    As John Aravosis eloquently states, “If the Vatican doesn’t intervene and reinstate Anthony Musaala, we’ll know all we need to know about the new Pope.”

    Pope Hilarious!

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    I really [on edit] DON’T [/on edit]have a dog in this hunt. So my only insight on this is that when I discovered that he chose to take the name Francis, as an homage to St. Francis of Assisi who vowed poverty, my only thought was that he was dissing his Prada slipper wearing predecessor.

    That being said, when I heard what Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio chose for his Pope name, I looked up a list of all the Popes, and it turned out that there was an actual Pope Hilarious.

    More correctly there was a Pope Hilarius, in the middle of the 5th century, who was later sainted.

    Go figure.

    What PZ Myers Said

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    He suggests that the buying spree of hospitals by the Catholic church is a stealth assault on reproductive rights and needs to be stopped:

    Imagine if you lived in a town where the only hospital was owned by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and you were in a car accident — you’ve got a ruptured spleen, you’re bleeding internally, and your life is at risk. The surgeon is going to go in and stitch up and cauterize everything, but you’re warned that they don’t keep any kind of blood supply in the hospital, and they refuse to do blood transfusions — they have an in-house professional ethicist (who is a Jehovah’s Witness, of course) who rejects the morality of exchanging sacred blood, and the administrators have signed an agreement with the church to never, under any circumstances, carry out blood transfusions.

     If you need a blood transfusion, they say, don’t worry, the ambulance will take you to a different hospital…50 miles away. You, unfortunately, are in shock, you’ve got a gusher pouring blood into your body cavity, and this is not an option. You get to die.

     ………

     So why are Catholics allowed to buy up and impose Catholic dogma on hospitals? Is it because their ignorant dogma does the greatest harm to women (especially those slutty ones who have sex) and bizarre rules about reproduction don’t directly harm men?

     But Catholics are buying up hospitals all over the country. They’ve got declining attendance, they’re closing churches, they’re having trouble recruiting priests, but they’ve still got buckets of money, and they’re using that money to impose control in another way — by taking over your health care.

    His conclusion is 100% spot on:

    Don’t let Catholics control your hospitals. Keep the church out of your health care decisions. Make Catholic Ethical and Religious Directives (ERDs) illegal — individuals may follow them at their personal discretion, but no health care facility gets to impose them on their patients, especially when they defy the law.

    Your religious freedom does not include the right to impose your views on me.

    Speculation About the Pope’s Abdication Gains Mainstream Currency

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    The speculation about why the Pope is stepping down has hit Reuters:

    Pope Benedict’s decision to live in the Vatican after he resigns will provide him with security and privacy. It will also offer legal protection from any attempt to prosecute him in connection with sexual abuse cases around the world, Church sources and legal experts say.

    “His continued presence in the Vatican is necessary, otherwise he might be defenseless. He wouldn’t have his immunity, his prerogatives, his security, if he is anywhere else,” said one Vatican official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

    “It is absolutely necessary” that he stays in the Vatican, said the source, adding that Benedict should have a “dignified existence” in his remaining years.

    Vatican sources said officials had three main considerations in deciding that Benedict should live in a convent in the Vatican after he resigns on February 28.

    Vatican police, who already know the pope and his habits, will be able to guarantee his privacy and security and not have to entrust it to a foreign police force, which would be necessary if he moved to another country.

    “I see a big problem if he would go anywhere else. I’m thinking in terms of his personal security, his safety. We don’t have a secret service that can devote huge resources (like they do) to ex-presidents,” the official said.

    It could be nothing, but my guess is that we are going to hear the drip, drip, drip of all of this for months.

    I actually have a bit of sympathy for him.  Benedict was left with the mess that John Paul created.  (It’s pretty clear that JPII gave then Cardinal Ratzinger instructions to cover up the allegations when he was head of the Inquisition Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.)

    Play Him Off, Keyboard Cat!

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    For the first time since 1415, the Pope Benedict has announced that he will be abdicating:

    Citing failing strength of “mind and body,” Pope Benedict XVI stunned his closest aides and more than 1 billion Catholics by resigning on Monday, becoming the first pope to do so in nearly 600 years and ending the tenure of a formidable theologian who preached a gospel of conservative faith to a fast-changing world.

    Keeping with his reputation as a traditionalist, Pope Benedict delivered his resignation — effective Feb. 28 — in Latin, to a private church body in Vatican City. “I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me,” he said. “For this reason, and well aware of the seriousness of this act, with full freedom I declare that I renounce the ministry of bishop of Rome, successor of Saint Peter.”

    The decision by the 85-year-old German pontiff sets up a pivotal leadership contest in the marbled halls of the Vatican that is coming sooner than observers expected. Although questions about the pope’s health have long swirled — he was occasionally filmed nodding off during mass — he seemed committed to continuing a papacy that has divided Catholics and non-Catholics alike.

    The question is whether it’s about his health, or whether, as as Digby suggests, that revelations from the case of former Archbishop of Los Angeles, Cardinal Roger Mahony, where Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then leader of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (it used to be called the Inquisition) was directing the (non) response to the church’s sexual abuse scandal.

    I’ll look forward to seeing Jon Stewart’s take on all this.

    Facepalm

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    Yes, considering the disaster that was the Israeli rump state in Lebanon, the idea that Israel is planning to establish a “buffer zone” in Syria does not bode well:

    ISRAEL is considering creating a buffer zone reaching up to 10 miles inside Syria to protect itself from fundamentalist rebels on the other side of the border.

     The proposal, which has been drawn up by the military and presented to Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, is intended to secure the 47-mile border against a growing Islamist threat if President Bashar al-Assad’s embattled regime loses control of the area.

     The buffer would be modelled on the Lebanese security zone, in which the Israeli defence forces patrolled jointly with the South Lebanon army, a militia, up to 16 miles inside Lebanon from 1985 to 2000.

    Yeah, and that whole Lebanese buffer zone worked so f%$#ing well.  derf

    This is insanity.