Cop Killer Thought He Was Jesus; Christian Law to Kill Gays

No sooner did a photo of alleged cop-killer Maurice Clemmons appear in the news than the screeching began. “He’s a Muslim” “He was radicalised in prison” “He’s another domestic terrorist!” Presumably this is because his visage is swarthy and he’s not smiling a genial smile, although the smile wouldn’t be necessary if he were paler in hue.

Once it became apparent that the late Maurice Clemmons was a Christian, nobody cared anymore. Most news article failed to mention it. Those that did buried it several paragraphs down the page. Because somehow when a American who practices Islam mows down soldiers, it’s terrorism, extremism, and an indictment of Islam, but when an American who practices Christianity mows down police officers, it is none of those things. And Mr Clemmons wasn’t just a cultural Christian, he thought he was Jesus.

“The whole time Clemmons kept saying things like trust him, the world is going to end soon, and that he was Jesus,” a Pierce County sheriff’s report said.

Clemmons was charged in Washington state earlier this year with assaulting a police officer and raping a child, and investigators in the sex case said he was motivated by visions that he was Jesus Christ and that the world was on the verge of the apocalypse.

Within a couple days after the Fort Hood shooting, we knew more about Major Nidal Hasan than we’ve ever known about any spree killer, ever. The media gave us its analysis of a PowerPoint presentation he gave to his colleagues, encouraged us to gasp at his email exchange with an American imam in Yemen (and I still haven’t heard a single peep from anyone complaining that we spied on an American citizen’s correspondence with an American citizen–which was judged by the FBI to be innocuous), and found a blog comment on the internet that sounded like he might have written it and attributed it to him. I imagine there are hundreds or thousands of people posting on the internet every day who say things that sound like something I would say. Please don’t attribute them to me. Thanks.

Christian evangelical minister ex-governor Mike Huckabee did not actually pardon Clemmons, so what I wrote the other day is not accurate. Huckabee recommended clemency, basically making him eligible for parole. Huckabee was prudent enough not mention the religious angle in any explanation for this clemency, so we can’t actually know that Huckabee gave Clemmons another chance because he felt he had truly repented and accepted Jesus into his heart.

Salon article on Huckabee’s dealings with Maurice Clemmons.

Huckabee has proudly declared on many occasions that he disdains the separation of church and state, insisting that his strict Baptist piety should serve as the bedrock of public policy. Nowhere in his record as governor was the influence of religious zeal felt more heavily than in the distribution of pardons and commutations, as his own explanations have indicated. During those years he granted more commutations and pardons than any governor during the previous four decades, many of them surely justified as a response to excessive penalties under the state’s draconian narcotics laws. But others were deeply controversial, especially because so many of his acts of mercy appeared to depend on interventions by fellow Baptist preachers and by inmate professions of renewed Christian faith.

No doubt word spread among the prison population that the affable governor was vulnerable to appeals from convicts who claimed to be born again. Clemmons too was among those who benefited from Huckabee’s tendency to believe such pious testimonials. “I come from a very good Christian family and I was raised much better than my actions speak,” he explained in his clemency application in 2000. “I’m still ashamed to this day for the shame my stupid involvement in these crimes brought upon my family’s name … I have never done anything good for God, but I’ve prayed for him to grant me in his compassion the grace to make a start. Now, I’m humbly appealing to you for a brand new start.”

New York Times article about Huckabee’s clemency issues.

Mr. Huckabee, who rode a brand of prairie populism to finish second in the Republican presidential primaries in 2008, granted more than 1,000 pardons or clemency requests as governor. As his reputation for granting clemency spread, more convicts applied. Aides said he read each file personally.

In most cases, he followed the recommendation of the parole board, but in several cases he overrode the objections of prosecutors, judges and victims’ families. And in several, he followed recommendations for clemency from Baptist preachers who had been longtime supporters.

Robert Herzfeld, then the prosecuting attorney of Saline County, wrote a letter to Governor Huckabee in January 2004, saying his policy on clemency was “fatally flawed” and suggesting that he should announce specific reasons for granting clemency. Mr. Huckabee’s chief aide on clemency wrote back: “The governor read your letter and laughed out loud. He wanted me to respond to you. I wish you success as you cut down on your caffeine consumption.”

After the Fort Hood shooting, public figures called for ousting Muslims from the US military. They shouted that Maj Hasan was allowed to remain in the Army due to “political correctness” and claimed that Muslims are a protected class in the United States. As if Maj Hasan wouldn’t have been able to shoot anybody if he’d been kicked out of the army, which by the way he had been trying to leave for years, to no avail. As if any Muslim can commit any kind of crime in the US without his religion making the headlines.

Meanwhile, some Christians in America are howling that they are the underclass, that everyone makes fun of them, that public entities sometimes acknowledge that there is some religious diversity in America. The “war on Christmas” is a good example.

Here’s a scientific study whose conclusions will come as no surprise to most:

For many religious people, the popular question “What would Jesus do?” is essentially the same as “What would I do?” That’s the message from an intriguing and controversial new study by Nicholas Epley from the University of Chicago. Through a combination of surveys, psychological manipulation and brain-scanning, he has found that when religious Americans try to infer the will of God, they mainly draw on their own personal beliefs.

Obviously, this is what Huckabee was drawing on when he was pardoning Christians and what Bush was drawing on when he decide to war on Muslims and when he looked into Putin’s eyes and “saw his soul.”

And along those lines, let’s talk about religion and its pernicious effects on the law. Take Uganda. It has no state religion, but the majority religion makes up 84% of the country and influences the legal and political system there. On top of that, a powerful and wealthy foreign country dominated by coreligionists has been exporting religious materials of the most extreme flavor to Uganda, and foreign fundamentalists attended a conference there earlier this year that led to an anti-homosexuality bill that if passed would impose the death penality for “aggravated homosexuality.”

Many speakers at that conference think that homosexuality is an illness that can be cured. One wrote a book that equates Nazism and homosexuality and one works at a foundation which ostensibly “cures” homosexuals.

“They told us all things are going wrong because the family is being neglected. Not having more children is one of the things that they said are going wrong. Homosexuality is a way of stopping us from having more children,” said Senyonjo.

Macauley, who fled Nigeria last year after receiving death threats for hosting a gay-friendly church, added that the harsh law comes in a context of perceived challenges to men’s role in society. Women’s increased agency, including deciding whether to have children and how many, is experienced as a threat by some men. A relationship between two men raises the fear that one of the men will behave “like a woman” in the household, which undermines any supposedly natural definition of men’s position in society.

One of these imported fundamentalists probably also met with a number of Ugandan parliamentarians.

A bill has since been drafted and was tabled on Oct 14 in Uganda’s parliament, legalising not only the persecution of lesbians and gays but also of straights that “support” them. The bill applies to Ugandans inside and outside the country. It nullifies Uganda’s ratification of any international treaties that support LGBTI human rights and explicitly rejects the notion that homosexuals have human rights.

Any parent who does not denounce their lesbian daughter or gay son to the authorities face fines of 2,650 dollars or three years’ imprisonment. Any teacher who does not report a lesbian or gay pupil faces the same punishment.

Senyonjo believes that the Ugandan law stems from the urge to protect patriarchal arrangements: “It is men who want the law. They have a very loud voice. The church is still very patriarchal. They want the man to be the head of the family. Even at weddings they say the man is the head and the woman has to be obedient.”

Shariah Christian law truly is harsh and blood-soaked. If only the close-minded fundamentalists who can’t get it enacted here in the US wouldn’t export it to the rest of the world. We excoriate Saudi Arabia for funding fundamentalist schools around the world, but turn a blind eye to Christian proselytizing of the most foul kind.

Alhamdulillah we have a wall of separation between church and state here in the US! Let’s hope politicians such as Huckabee, Palin and Bachmann are never able to tear it down.

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For readers outside the US who may not know who Mike Huckabee is, he is a former candidate for president who in a Gallup poll published in early Nov 2009 was the Republican frontrunner for a presidential run in 2012.

71% of Republicans say they would seriously consider voting for Mike Huckabee.

Christian Terror, Political Correctness, Etc.

More on this story when I get a chance to blog, this afternoon, I hope.

[Cop-massacre suspect pardoned by evangelist governor Mike Huckabee, Maurice] Clemmons was charged in Washington state earlier this year with assaulting a police officer and raping a child, and investigators in the sex case said he was motivated by visions that he was Jesus Christ and that the world was on the verge of the apocalypse.

So happy the occasional news source will come through with the information after a few days. Not quite like when the shooter is a Muslim, but at least it showed up buried down the page a few days later.

Funny that on some blogs people no sooner saw his picture (dark-skinned man) than they assumed he was a Muslim who had become “radicalized” in prison.

“The whole time Clemmons kept saying things like trust him, the world is going to end soon, and that he was Jesus,” a Pierce County sheriff’s report said.

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UPDATE: I won’t have time to blog this today. It may have to wait until the weekend. I also want to add something about Shariah Christian law in Uganda, where homosexuals will likely soon face the death penalty.

Some of the obstacles identified as standing in the way of dialogue between LGBTI people and clergy were: ignorance about sexuality; scriptural interpretations; silence and invisibility of LGBTI people in religious communities; taboos on discussing sexuality in some African societies; hierarchical church structures; and oppressive laws.

Senyonjo believes that the Ugandan law stems from the urge to protect patriarchal arrangements: “It is men who want the law. They have a very loud voice. The church is still very patriarchal. They want the man to be the head of the family. Even at weddings they say the man is the head and the woman has to be obedient.”

How backwards!

“…But You Throw One Shoe…”

Muntazar al-Zaydi is the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at president Bush, yelling the immortal words, “This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog,” and, “This is for the widows and orphans and all those killed in Iraq.”

Immediately after his release in September he left the country for medical treatment, then got some love in Switzerland before returning to Iraq.

Now he has established a foundation . Maybe some day he’ll be remembered for something other than the shoe-throwing incident.

The MAZ Foundation being secular and independent of all political and religious institutions intends to bring financial, medical and logistical aid to the victims of the breaches to Human Rights in Iraq. It is also the ambition of the foundation to play a role in the prevention of the violating of Human Rights by giving media coverage to individual and collective tragedies and to making international opinion aware of the suffering of the Iraqi people. The MAZ Foundation also intends to finance all national and international legal actions leading to the acknowledgement of guilt and responsibility for the physical, material and moral prejudice suffered by the civilian population.

Here’s the contact page if you should wish to donate.

And here the immortal words in Arabic, in case you have a use for them:

هذه قبلة الوداع من الشعب العراقي أيها الكلب

and

وهذه من الأرامل والأيتام والأشخاص الذين قتلتهم

Iraq is Such a Disappointment to Us

Not to spend too much time on this NYTimes article about how the Iraqis are letting us down by being too dead, disabled, or abroad to run the cool factories and hospitals we built for them just ’cause we’re nice like that. Most of the people who read this blog probably already read that article and commented on it on a bigger blog. So here are just a few choice bits:

BAGHDAD — In its largest reconstruction effort since the Marshall Plan, the United States government has spent $53 billion for relief and reconstruction in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, building tens of thousands of hospitals, water treatment plants, electricity substations, schools and bridges.

But there are growing concerns among American officials that Iraq will not be able to adequately maintain the facilities once the Americans have left, potentially wasting hundreds of millions of dollars and jeopardizing Iraq’s ability to provide basic services to its people.

The projects run the gamut — from a cutting-edge, $270 million water treatment plant in Nasiriya that works at a fraction of its intended capacity because it is too sophisticated for Iraqi workers to operate, to a farmers’ market that farmers cannot decide how to share, to a large American hospital closed immediately after it was handed over to Iraq because the government was unable to supply it with equipment, a medical staff or electricity.

Stuart W. Bowen Jr., inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, said his watchdog agency had “regularly raised concerns about the potential waste of U.S. taxpayer money resulting from reconstruction projects that were poorly planned, badly transferred, or insufficiently sustained by the Iraqi government.”

The blame is shared, officials said. While Iraq has often been guilty of poor management, American authorities have repeatedly failed to ask Iraqis what sort of projects they needed and have not followed up with adequate training.

And whether or not the American-built health centers and power plants are ever used as intended, the American companies that won the lion’s share of rebuilding contracts from the federal government have been paid.

Exactly. They got paid, defense industry folks got rich, that’s what we went into Iraq for. Done and done.

Despite the $53 billion spent by the United States, many Iraqis have criticized the rebuilding effort as wasteful. Ali Ghalib Baban, Iraq’s minister of planning, said it had not had a discernible impact. “Maybe they spent it,” he said, “but Iraq doesn’t feel it.”

Iraqis, for whom bombed-out buildings are an unremarkable part of urban existence, also say they have seen little evidence of rebuilding.

“Where is the reconstruction?” asked Sahar Kadhum, a resident of Kut, about 100 miles southeast of Baghdad. “The city is sleeping on hills of garbage.”

Indeed, despite the billions in American funds, more than 40 percent of Iraqis still lack access to clean water, according to the Iraqi government. Ninety percent of Iraq’s 180 hospitals do not have basic medical and surgical supplies, according to the aid organization Oxfam. Iraqis also have disproportionately high rates of infant mortality, cerebral palsy and cancer.

Exacerbating the problem, Iraqi and American officials say, is that hundreds of thousands of Iraq’s professional class have fled or been killed during the war, leaving behind a population with too few doctors, nurses, engineers, scientists and the like.

Buried on the second page, of course. I’d have put it in one of the first two paragraphs, personally.

Also on the subject of health in Iraq, here’s a Guardian article on a huge rise in birth defects in Fallujah.

Doctors in Iraq’s war-ravaged enclave of Falluja are dealing with up to 15 times as many chronic deformities in infants, compared to a year ago, and a spike in early life cancers that may be linked to toxic materials left over from the fighting.

The extraordinary rise in birth defects has crystallised over recent months as specialists working in Falluja’s over-stretched health system have started compiling detailed clinical records of all babies born.

Neurologists and obstetricians in the city interviewed by the Guardian say the rise in birth defects – which include a baby born with two heads, babies with multiple tumours, and others with nervous system problems – are unprecedented and at present unexplainable.

Other health officials are also starting to focus on possible reasons, chief among them potential chemical or radiation poisonings. Abnormal clusters of infant tumours have also been repeatedly cited in Basra and Najaf – areas that have in the past also been intense battle zones where modern munitions have been heavily used.

Falluja’s frontline doctors are reluctant to draw a direct link with the fighting. They instead cite multiple factors that could be contributors.

“These include air pollution, radiation, chemicals, drug use during pregnancy, malnutrition, or the psychological status of the mother,” said Dr Qais. “We simply don’t have the answers yet.”

I am not a doctor and have no medical training, but I don’t believe that the psychological status of the mother can cause birth defects.

Falluja was the scene of the only two setpiece battles that followed the US-led invasion. Twice in 2004, US marines and infantry units were engaged in heavy fighting with Sunni militia groups who had aligned with former Ba’athists and Iraqi army elements.

The first battle was fought to find those responsible for the deaths of four Blackwater private security contractors working for the US. The city was bombarded heavily by American artillery and fighter jets. Controversial weaponry was used, including white phosphorus, which the US government admitted deploying.

“Setpiece battles”?

Despite fully funding the construction of the new hospital, a well-equipped facility that opened in August, Iraq’s health ministry remains largely disfunctional and unable to co-ordinate a response to the city’s pressing needs.

On the bright side (just kidding, really), our system of prisons in Iraq (specifically, sweeping up every able- and semi-able-bodied male between eleven and ninety-nine years old and dumping them in a filthy jail with no recourse to the law) has been judged such a success by military commanders that they intend to do the same thing in Afghanistan. Tehran Times article here. Entire article:

Following with the trend of trying to shoehorn the dubious Iraq War strategy onto Afghanistan, the US Army says that it intends to copy its prison strategy from Iraq in Afghanistan.

Brigadier General Quantock touted the Iraqi prison system as a great success, citing the relatively small percentage of released detainees who were re-captured.

It may come as a considerable surprise that the general considers America’s prison strategy in Iraq such an unabashed success, particularly since it wasn’t that long ago that they were scrambling to reform the disastrous system.

And in fact, the recidivism numbers cited are misleading, as one of the most common complaints was that the U.S. tactic of mass arrests had led many innocent people into the prison system simply for being near a militant attack and eventually released without ever being charged with any crimes.

Moreover, Iraq’s police have long complained that the U.S. detention system, with its brutal reputation, amounts to a series of “terrorist factories” where innocent detainees and petty criminals are radicalized.

Brig. Gen. Quantock dismissed these claims and was quick to lay the blame on Iraq’s legal system. Yet if this is a problem in Iraq and will be doubly so in Afghanistan, one of the most corrupt and lawless nations on the planet.

If you’re a fan of snotty NYTimes articles where we deride the Iraqis as being inferior to us, here’s an article for you.

The same US Army that brought you the men who stare at goats is making fun of Iraqi law enforcement for spending a lot of money on bomb detection equipment the US thinks is worthless.

The small hand-held wand, with a telescopic antenna on a swivel, is being used at hundreds of checkpoints in Iraq. But the device works “on the same principle as a Ouija board” — the power of suggestion — said a retired United States Air Force officer, Lt. Col. Hal Bidlack, who described the wand as nothing more than an explosives divining rod.

Still, the Iraqi government has purchased more than 1,500 of the devices, known as the ADE 651, at costs from $16,500 to $60,000 each. Nearly every police checkpoint, and many Iraqi military checkpoints, have one of the devices, which are now normally used in place of physical inspections of vehicles.

The Iraqis, however, believe passionately in them. “Whether it’s magic or scientific, what I care about is it detects bombs,” said Maj. Gen. Jehad al-Jabiri, head of the Ministry of the Interior’s General Directorate for Combating Explosives.

Dale Murray, head of the National Explosive Engineering Sciences Security Center at Sandia Labs, which does testing for the Department of Defense, said the center had “tested several devices in this category, and none have ever performed better than random chance.”

Love it! The scorn! “The same principle as the Ouija board.” What does this remind me of? Oh yeah, it reminds me of the US Department of Defense’s reliance on polygraph tests!

The accuracy of polygraphic lie detection is slightly above chance. Nevertheless, State and local police departments and law enforcement agencies across the United States are devoted proponents of this unscientific and specious device.

I don’t want to quote too much of this article here, but please read it if you are interested in how US law enforcement uses voodoo science, our modern version of phrenology.

The APA is a professional organization for polygraph examiners who have complete faith in the accuracy of the test. They have their own trade journal Polygraph in which they report scientifically worthless studies and brandish anecdotes of the wonders of their trade. The majority of these members can pride themselves on completing a 6 week to 6 month post- high school training course in the art of polygraphy. They have no formal training in medicine, psychology, physiology, or behavior; the very disciplines on which the testing is based. The majority of them cater to the legal system wherein their economic livelihood depends.

Since they are primarily paid to identify guilty suspects, motivational factors may play a part in their eagerness to find the guilty suspect. (Kleinmuntz, 1987)

The polygraph examiner likens his “skill” to that of the radiologist reading a chest X-Ray or a cardiologist interpreting an EKG. (Barefoot, 1974) This analogy is not only ridiculous but, in fact, if a medical test had a similar sensitivity and specificity to that of the polygraph examination it would simply not be used in the field of medicine. They will cite the fact that the polygraph has been used in the United States for greater than 70 years as if longevity is directly related to validity. They will state that they have personally administered hundreds or thousands of these tests, and have almost never been wrong, as if total number of tests given constitutes accuracy.

They are so convinced of the accuracy of the polygraph that they regard opponents of polygraphy as communists and do-nothing professors. (Arther, 1986) It doesn’t occur to them that someone with a Ph.D. and years of research experience, in the very subjects they ignorantly dabble in, may know something more than they do.

It is astounding that the criminal justice system has institutionalized and perpetuated a so called “technology” that lacks scientific evidence and is in fact rejected by the scientific community. It is as ludicrous as procuring the so called “love meter” machine from the amusement park which measures galvanic skin response and placing it in the courtroom. But in a backward legal system which has been known to use psychics to help with unsolved murders and has allowed the mentally retarded to serve as jurors, it is not entirely surprising.

You just have to laugh at those unsophisticated rubes in the US Department of Defense paying good money to polygraphers. As antiPolygraph.org says:

The reliability of polygraph testing for employee screening is widely disputed on scientific grounds. But many government security officials nevertheless insist on its value and utility, and the practice persists.

Significantly, the new directive tightens control over DoD agencies’ use of any “credibility assessment” technology other than the polygraph. This seems a likely reaction to the post-9/11 debacle wherein some DoD components began using Computer Voice Stress Analysis (CVSA) to interrogate prisoners. The manufacturer of this quack device, the so-called “National Institute of Truth Verification,” has admitted in court that CVSA “is not capable of lie detection,” and the company was recently the subject of an ABC News exposé. DoD eventually put an end to its use of CVSA. The new directive ensures that henceforward, DoD agencies will use only officially approved pseudoscientific techniques for “credibility assessment” purposes.

For more about what we did (wrong) in Iraq, I recommend: Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side. Buy them here.

No Fatal Tramplings This Year

*whew* There were no fatal tramplings on Black Friday in the US this year, nor were there any fatal tramplings on Hajj in Saudi Arabia.
Congratulations, all.

And it looks like there were no Black Friday-related shootings this year either. So that makes one year since the last fatal Black Friday shooting. Here’s hoping for a streak.

Is It My Imagination…

…or isn’t this woman a dead ringer for Emilio Estevez?

Emily Ruete (1844-1924) was born in Zanzibar as Sayyida Salme, Princess of Zanzibar and Oman.

Almost. Sayyida is not her name, it’s an indication that she’s supposedly a descendant of the prophet Muhammad, and I don’t know that “princess” is the most appropriate designation, but she wrote her own history for a western, Christian audience, so “princess” is what they would have understood.

Wikipedia has more.

But seriously, she looks like Emilio Estevez, right?

Cat Photo

It is so hard to get a good picture of her. For one, she hates attention and usually moves away when I point the camera at her, and also she’s so dark. *sigh* I see other people’s cat pictures will all kinds of personality showing and I can’t get it from her.

I Didn’t Know That!

Landover Baptist Church’s website has a whole passel of quizzes to test your knowledge of religion (mostly Christianity with some Islam thrown in).
Today I took a few, did well on one, not very well on another, although I’d argue a few of the answers. Anyway, it’s just for fun.
Now I’m taking the Landover Baptist Biblical Punishment Quiz. Should be fun. Looks how promising the first question is:

1. What punishment did God say is mandatory for an unruly child?
a. None. God is loving and forgiving and does not believe in punishing children.
b. Mandatory time-outs
c. Stoning To Death
d. Deprivation of privileges; grounding

I know this one!

Mister Peabody Visits the Middle East in 1953

And gives Sherman a little lesson in what the CIA has been up to since then in the region. I love it!

I never realized how talky Mister Peabody and Sherman cartoons were until now. Makes it easy to replace the original dialogue with dialogue of your own, if you’re a talented voice artist. I must have learned a lot of history from these cartoons.

Found at Just Another Blog From LA.

btw, there is some foul language, so don’t traumatize the little kiddies.

Round-Up of Disheartening Stories

Found all of these of Huffington Post, which I don’t usually link to, but since there was such a big batch of them, all the links are to HuffPo.

1. The Ku Klux Klan will hold a rally right before a University of Mississippi football game. This is in protest of the university chancellor’s decision to prevent the band from playing, “From Dixie with Love,” because the fans have a habit of chanting “the south will rise again” when it is played.

The KKK is the US’s longest-running hate group, formed by sore losers immediately after the Civil War. And they’re still active today, beating and shooting folks, and encouraging their followers to attend today’s “tea parties.”

2. A Vatican researcher, working “without the support of the Vatican,” insists she can prove that the shroud of Turin is really truly Jesus Christ’s death wrapping.

3. There’s a new outlandish billboard, this time equating President Obama with a turban-wearing jihadist. Side note: the billboard meister claims that the words “We are a christian nation” appear in the constitution.

4. Congressman Peter King, who has been a personal friend of, a collaborator with, and spokesman for Irish Republican Army terrorists and who nevertheless insists that only Muslims are terrorists, wants our lawmakers to pass a resolution honoring Christmas. Why did he bother?

I would not have brought this resolution if they hadn’t brought the Ramadan and the Diwali resolutions.

Because congress acknowledged religious diversity in the United States!