Category: Religion

Sharia Schools in England

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This is simply astonishing:

Children were taught that all Christians are liars and attempts were made to introduce Sharia law in classrooms as part of an alleged ‘Trojan Horse’ takeover plot of Birmingham schools, an inquiry has found.
The inquiry commissioned by Birmingham City Council found evidence of religious extremism in 13 schools as school governors and teachers tried to promote and enforce radical Islamic values.
Schools put up posters warning children that if they didn’t pray they would “go to hell”, Christmas was cancelled and girls were taught that women who refused to have sex with their husbands would be “punished” by angels “from dusk to dawn”.
The report found that the extremism went unchecked because the council “disastrously” prioritised community cohesion over “doing what is right”. . . .
Sir Albert Bore, Birmingham’s leader, apologised for the council’s handling of the scandal.
He said: “The actions of a few, including some within the council, have undermined the reputation of our great city.
“We have previously shied away from tackling this problem out of a misguided fear of being accused of racism.”

Once you get over your “misguided fear of being accused of racism” — or sexism or homophobia — you start noticing facts.

(Via Memeorandum.)

 

They Always Blame the Jews

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The “Final Solution” to the Mideast problem:

As Hamas Rockets continued to rain down on Israeli population centers, a large anti-Israel rally took place in Seattle’s Westlake Center this Saturday, July 12. Protesters screamed anti-Israel slogans calling for the destruction of the Jewish state while waving signs and marching through the downtown sidewalks. But this was more than a rally in opposition to Israel or her defensive operations. The signs being waved and the chants hollered constituted a shocking public display of shameless Jew hatred right in the heart of Seattle.
Signs comparing Jews to Nazis were commonplace . . .
While you may have thought that blood libel accusations are a relic of the past, in fact the slander was alive and well in downtown Seattle this past Saturday.

Read the whole thing — with numerous photos. Is it merely a coincidence that President Obama’s approval rating is highest among Muslims than among any other religious group? I think not.

The most fervent disciples of anti-American hatred know who their friends are — and we know who their enemies are, don’t we?

 

An Omen of the ‘Mystifying Oracle’?

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“One time I was with Cara, Chloe, Anne, and Ellie,
and we were messing around with a Ouija board.”

The blogger at “Please Excuse My Vagina: My life as a teenage feminist” will probably notice the trackback, and to her this should be a warning — as it should be to anyone tempted to try “messing around” with the occult. WARNING: EVIL IS REAL.

Maybe you’re not religious. Maybe you think the Bible is just a lot of superstitious nonsense. Nevertheless, evil is real, and even if you think you’re just “messing around” with it, you are in danger.

Those weird coincidences you keep noticing? They’re not coincidences.

Life has a meaning and purpose. We are not random collections of atoms. Human beings have spirits — souls — and our lives are part of something larger than ourselves. Most people do not notice the evidence of this larger meaning and purpose. They lack a spiritual awareness and do not contemplate the relationship between their own mundane existence and the eternal truth of the cosmos. And so they do not notice that seemingly random events aren’t actually random.

So you were “messing around with a Ouija board” — random.

And your first boyfriend was a manipulative jerk — random.

Then you were riding home from your dance recital and, for no apparent reason, your dad got angry and started shouting at you.

Is all this random? Just a coincidence?

“I’m a self-righteous bitch. I don’t have any religion. . . .
I was raised in a liberal household, being taught
that everyone’s opinion is equal and valid, and
also being taught to value my own opinions.”

OK, I guess, except that if “everyone’s opinion is equal and valid,” you can’t really have any core foundational beliefs, which might be a problem when you start to fear that you’re going insane:

I started out the day so tired I was physically unable to move. My mom had to come in and tell me to get out of bed about five times.
I cried twice in about twenty minutes . . .
When people ask me to do things I find myself saying no more and more often. My friends are getting pissed off at me for being so apathetic. . . .
Thinking of all the things I might do wrong and all the people I might lose. And that was when I realized.
It’s happening again.
In sixth grade, I was depressed or anxious or some combination of both. I was never officially diagnosed, so maybe it was nothing and I was just being crazy. . . .
I imagine funerals. Eulogies I would give. Eulogies people would give me. I imagine people who aren’t even my friends dragging blades over their skin or killing themselves because of careless bitchy little comments I’ve made. I imagine the people I love pushed too far by something I said and sent careening over the edge. Vivid images of me or my family dying in a huge car crash flash behind my eyelids.
It’s happening again and I don’t know how to stop it. . . .
I’ve also somehow developed an intense pathological fear of bugs. . . . I constantly feel things crawling on my skin or fluttering near me but when I look there is, without fail, no creature in sight.

The good news: If you think you’re going crazy, you’re probably not. As long as you have enough self-awareness to recognize these ideas and behaviors as abnormal, you’re not insane . . . yet.

The bad news: If it doesn’t get better, that means it’s getting worse, because the persistence of the symptoms is itself symptomatic.

Anybody can have crazy feelings or spells of depression once in a while. If these things persist, however, the word “chronic” applies, and your morbid obsessions — your irrational death-related ideations — are not encouraging in that regard.

So, let’s get back to the reality of evil and that Ouija board incident. Lots of kids try “messing around” with the occult in this manner, without thinking that they thereby make themselves vulnerable to evil. It’s like the concept of marijuana as a “gateway drug”; you start “messing around” with weed, next thing you try LSD or Ecstasy, then prescription pain-killers or meth, and one day a dopehead friend tells you she’s tried heroin and you think, “Hmmm.”

Same deal with “messing around” with the occult. Sure, a Ouija board is a silly child’s game. But will it stop there? Maybe next you’ll be “messing around” with astrology or tarot cards. You’ll find a friend who shares these interests, and that friend will start telling you about paganism and Wicca and if you keep going in that direction, who knows where you’ll end up? People who say they “don’t have any religion” are often the most vulnerable to the occult, without evidently recognizing that such beliefs are also a religion.

Does it seem to you, however, that there could be a connection between your “messing around” with the occult and your recent emotional disturbances? Because I don’t believe in coincidences, and because evil is real, it strikes me that you may be under the influence of evil — and I mean Evil with a capital “E” — without realizing it.

Well, I ain’t superstitious.
Black cat just crossed my trail . . .
Don’t sweep me with no broom.
I might get put in jail.
— “I Ain’t Superstitious,” Willie Dixon (1961)

Rather than being superstitious, let’s exclude the possibility that the “Mystifying Oracle” of the Ouija board summoned forth the spirits to provide the answer to your inquiry. There were five girls involved in that game — yourself, Cara, Chloe, Anne, and Ellie — and let us suppose that at least one of them deliberately manipulated the result.

Who suggested this game and why? What was their motive? Evil has human agents, after all, and if the Powers of Darkness wished to influence you, wouldn’t your “friends” be an obvious means of exercising such an influence? You see that, even if you don’t attribute any magical power to the Ouija board, it can still be an instrument of evil through which your “friends” act to cause you harm.

“Ellie told me later that they were surprised . . .
that I seemed so casual about it.”

Were they really surprised?

“Especially important is the warning to avoid conversations with the demon. . . . He is a liar. The demon is a liar. He will lie to confuse us. But he will also mix lies with the truth to attack us. The attack is psychological, Damien, and powerful. So don’t listen to him. Remember that — do not listen.”
— The Exorcist (1973)

If you’ve never read the book The Exorcist, you might want to do that, because it is actually quite a profound meditation on the nature of evil, and our vulnerability to evil. What we call “mental illness” was understood by the ancients as demonic possession, and I’m not sure that modern science is more accurate than the ancient understanding. Psychiatrists keep telling us it’s all neurochemistry — serotonin and synapses, blah, blah, blah — but is insanity always organic? Do crazy people just have bad brains? Isn’t our belief in the omnipotence of science a sort of religion?

Is it not possible that there are things beyond human explanation? Are we who believe in cosmic truth just stupid and ignorant? And what about your own search for answers?

I’ve been feeling this weird sense of powerlessness lately, like I have no control over anything in my life. . . .
Recently, I’ve been having a lot of mini-existential crises, mostly of the if-we-suffer-so-much-why-do-we-exist variety. I mostly just question myself in circles and end up exhausted by the end of it. . . .
I’m a control freak with no control over anything. . . .
I used to think I had some semblance of control over some of the things that happened to me in my tiny, insignificant life. But apparently that’s not true. Things happen to and around me and I have no control or power over them and that scares me, it really does.
Sometimes when I feel like this I find myself wanting to turn to a higher power, but there’s no higher power that I have the strength to believe in. I find it impossible to believe in a supreme being that allows terrible things to happen to people on a daily basis, that allows human beings to destroy themselves all the time, without so much as a whispered word of assistance.
Sometimes I’ll pray. I don’t know who or what I’m praying to, or if my prayers are heard.

WARNING: Evil is real. If you “don’t know who or what [you’re] praying to,” don’t you think Satan may be listening? Yes, “terrible things happen to people on a daily basis,” but why do think that is? Don’t you think that Evil and Death are partners? And if you surrender to the influence of Evil, what do you think happens next?

Hadn’t you better see if Good and Life are within reach?

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”
— John 1: 1-5 (KJV)

Darkness still does not comprehend the light.

By the way, Miss Teenage Feminist, isn’t it kind of weird that I found your blog this morning? I’ve been researching radical feminism — a mental illness in its own right — and it is admittedly weird to discover a high school kid writing about “heteronormativity.”

Probably just another random coincidence, eh?

 

The Devil in Oklahoma: Satanic Ritual Promoted by Registered Sex Offender

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Headline at the Daily Caller:

What Did Oklahoma Do To Incur
The Wrath Of Satan And His Minions?

The news is bizarre: The Oklahoma City Civic Center Music Hall will be the site of a Black Mass event in September, sponsored by the “Dakhma of Angra Mainyu,” a satanic cult led by Adam Daniel.

In an e-mail to Aleteia.com, Daniel said the Black Mass is planned as “a defiant act to show the Catholics that Satanism will stand up and fight for our religious rights.” Other than worship of Beelzebub, what “religious rights” does Daniel have in mind?

Dakhma of Angra Mainyu is about freedom from any religion that chooses to bind you to some type of dogma [that] forces you to restrain your natural animal instincts. . . .
Choose Angra Mainyu, and become a natural animal of flesh once again.

Hmmm. So it’s about becoming “a natural animal of flesh.” Would it surprise you to learn that, according to KWTV, Adam Daniel is a registered sex offender who reportedly had an “inappropriate relationship” with a female inmate when he worked as a prison guard?

If you’re waiting for feminists to denounce this satanic pervert for “rape culture,” you’ll be waiting until Hell freezes over.

 

Obama’s Jihad-Loving DHS Adviser

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Add @MohamedElibiary to the list of Obama administration scandals that the Democrat-Media Complex expect us to ignore. Ace of Spades was all over this story last night: “By the way, this ‘senior fellow’ at DHS is a Muslim Brotherhood booster. He called Mohammad Morsi, the now-deposed Muslim Brotherhood president of Egypt, Egypt’s Nelson Mandela.” But al-Qaeda just captured Saddam’s old chemical weapons plant in Iraq, so there’s nothing to worry about.

 

BOOM! WaPo’s Dana @Milbank ‘Is Why People Loathe Journalists’

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So says Mollie Hemingway (@mzhemingway), reacting to the columnist’s deliberate distortion of a Heritage Foundation event:

This, my friends, is why people loathe journalists. They twist and turn and play gotcha games. Also, they make stuff up. A good editor in my past told me that he was always suspicious of reporters who rely on breaking up a quote multiple times and adding in their own words in between. It means they’re trying to force the speaker to say something. We can now call this the Milbank Rule.

What happened was that a Muslim student at American University attended a panel discussion about Benghazi and — in a complete non sequitur — accused the panelists of blaming “all Muslims” for the terrorist attack in Libya that killed four Americans. This was a rude provocation, but transcripts and video of the event show that the panelists responded courteously. Yet Dana Milbank wrote this:

“Are you an American?” Gabriel demanded of Ahmed, after accusing her of taking “the limelight” and before informing her that her “political correctness” belongs “in the garbage.”

The panelist quoted is Brigitte Gabriel, the Lebanese-American author of an excellent book, Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America, which I have often recommended. But as Hemingway points out, Milbank’s partial quote of Gabriel completely distorts what Gabriel actually said to the student, Saba Ahmed:

And since you’re the only Muslim representative in here, you took the limelight instead of speaking about why our government — and I assume are you an American? — You’re an American citizen — So as an American citizen you set in this room and instead of standing up and saying a question or asking something about our four Americans that died and what our government is doing to correct the problem, you stood there to make a point about peaceful moderate Muslims. I wish you brought 10 with you to question about how we can hold our government responsible. It is time we took political correctness and throw it in the garbage where it belongs.

Do you see the vast difference between what Gabriel actually said and how Dana Milbank characterized it? Brigitte Gabriel isn’t just making a partisan talking point when she criticizes “political correctness” about Islamic terrorism. Our general unwillingness to recognize the nature and scope of the threat made the United States vulnerable to attack 9/11, and our ridiculous fear of offending “peaceful moderate Muslims” continues to hamper an effective response to the radical menace. This is a serious policy problem, and Milbank’s cheap partisan smear job — calculated to depict conservatives as hateful and irrational — is symptomatic of the problem.

Exit question: Which anti-American extremist organization is a greater threat to our freedom, al-Qaeda or the Washington Post?

(Hat-tips: Instapundit and Memeorandum.)

 

Al-Qaeda on the Offensive in Iraq

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This was entirely predictable:

Insurgents seized control early Tuesday of most of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, including the provincial government headquarters, offering a powerful demonstration of the mounting threat posed by extremists to Iraq’s teetering stability.
Fighters with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), an al-Qaeda offshoot, overran the entire western bank of the city overnight after Iraqi soldiers and police apparently fled their posts, in some instances discarding their uniforms as they sought to escape the advance of the militants.
Iraq’s speaker of parliament, Osama Nujaifi, said the city that ranks as the capital of northern Iraq is now entirely in insurgent hands.

Much more, including video, at Hot Air. Notice that they’re “insurgents,” “extremists” or “militants” — not terrorists, because terrorism has been defined out of existence in the Obama Age.

 

High School ‘Death Cult’: Parents Claim Daughters Were Targeted by ‘Coven’

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The federal lawsuit Doe v. Mastoloni, et al., demands a jury trial, which would be the biggest thing since the Salem Witch Trials:

A couple have claimed that their three daughters were indoctrinated into a religious cult by their school teachers leaving them with suicidal thoughts and alienated from their loving family, according to a new lawsuit.
The couple, from Avon, Connecticut, filed the civil lawsuit in federal court on Monday against the Avon school district, three teachers and a guidance counselor at Avon High School and Wellesley College in Massachusetts.
The parents alleged that their older daughters, now aged 22 and 19, became ‘reclusive, secretive and distant’ after they began taking Spanish classes at Avon High.
The named defendants are Connecticut residents Tanya Mastoloni (also known as Tanya Romero), Rebecca Kessler; Laura Sullivan and California resident Christopher Esposito. . . .
Their girls began having ‘fantasies of suicidal ideation and martyrdom’, according to the suit.
They also began to speak in a strange language and gathered at Wellesley College in Massachusetts to perform religious ‘whirling dervish’ dances throughout the night.
The couple claimed that the teachers and counselor indoctrinated their daughters into a cult that promotes martyrdom and celebrates death. . . .
The indoctrination by the teachers reportedly continued when two of the girls went to Wellesley College.
According to the 64-page lawsuit, the youngest daughter was also targeted to be indoctrinated into the same belief system, but she broke free. She has jointly filed the lawsuit with her parents.
The two elder sisters have had no contact with their family since last July along with their extended family and friends at the urging of the group of teachers, it is claimed.

You can read the whole thing. It makes perfect sense that the cult leaders would encourage their young acolytes to attend Wellesley College — Hillary Clinton’s alma mater, IYKWIMAITYD.

UPDATE: The lawsuit refers to the parents as Jane and John Doe, and refers to their three daughters as E.D. (age 22), L.D. (19), and J.D. (16), and describes their “indoctrination”:

All three girls experienced sudden and severe personality changes. They became flat and distant, reclusive, secretive, and non-communicative. They lost their humor and their empathy. They began speaking in a bizarre new language. They became unable to think critically or independently. They became dependent on the school teachers and guidance counselor who had indoctrinated them, especially Defendant Tanya Mastoloni.
On information and belief, the two older Doe sisters were indoctrinated into a religious cult that promotes martyrdom, and celebrates death. This has caused the elder Doe sisters to experience fantasies of suicidal ideation and martyrdom.
The youngest Doe daughter, J.D., was targeted to be indoctrinated into the same belief system, but she eventually broke free. …
Defendant Mastoloni would often act as a friend to the students rather than a teacher. She spent much class time socializing with the students rather than teaching. During Spanish class, Defendant Mastoloni often told inappropriate stories to the students. For instance, Defendant Mastoloni freely discussed her abusive upbringing, including stories of kidnapping and forcible rape by her stepfather. . . .
Defendant Mastoloni would often pry into students’ personal lives, and try to [elicit] personal information about them. Defendant Mastoloni would constantly ask the students in class to tell her who is dating who. Defendant Mastoloni would ask the students to describe their dreams, so that she could interpret them for the students. Defendant Mastoloni would frequently talk to the students about her own boyfriends and other personal business . . .
Defendants Mastoloni, Kessler, Esposito, and Sullivan behaved as if they were in a clique. When they liked a student, they would make that student feel like he or she was part of their group. When they did not like a student, they would ostracize and alienate that student. . . .
Defendant Mastoloni freely gave students access to her home address and private cell phone number. Students would go to her house and talk to her frequently and consider her a friend. . . . .
Defendant Mastoloni was not just teaching her students Spanish. She taught her students religion and pseudoscience. Specifically, she taught her students to believe in superstition, magic, and a non-scientific, anti-intellectual worldview. She would discuss spirituality, numerology, astrology, dreams, mysticism, looking for signs, angels, symbols, synchronicity, negativity, seeking the truth, and death.

The lawsuit never gives a specific name to the “religion” into which the parents claim their daughters were indoctrinated, but the description seems generally to be a sort of New Age mysticism.

UPDATE II: More details from the lawsuit:

During senior year, after E.D. turned 18, Defendant Mastoloni’s attention to E.D. became even more intense. Defendant Mastoloni said to E.D., “Now that you are mi hermana, you are an adult and we can be friends outside of school.” …
Defendant Esposito was also being inappropriately intrusive. For instance, he once asked E.D. about the sexual orientation of her siblings. …
E.D. underwent another phase of her personality change in August of 2012, when she was entering her junior year in college. . . . Defendant Mastoloni would constantly be looking to go out with E.D. socially. Defendant Mastoloni brought E.D. into her home. E.D. told Jane and John [her parents] that she wanted to attend Defendant Mastoloni’s graduation from some type of school where Defendant Mastoloni was receiving a degree in spirituality. Defendant Mastoloni claimed it was a masters in conscious evolution. Yet, when Jane and John asked E.D. for the name of the school, E.D. claimed she did not know. Then, E.D. suddenly declared that her major would be philosophy, instead of political science or international relations like she originally decided. E.D. also announced that she wanted to seek a masters in Divinity following graduation from Wellesley. E.D. was unable to offer any real explanation for her sudden interest in religion. …
E.D. was constantly talking about seeking the truth and pursuing a greater purpose. All of E.D.’s conversations involved Defendant Mastoloni. . . .
When confronted by her family about her disturbing behavior, she gave a pat answer, “You don’t understand the person I have become.”

UPDATE III: After the two older girls had allegedly been “indoctrinated” and were both attending Wellesley, Mastoloni then allegedly targeted the youngest sister, with the help of the older girls:

In spring semester 2013, the Doe’s youngest child, J.D., was 15 and had Defendant Mastoloni as a Spanish teacher. . . . Once again, Defendant Mastoloni consistently proselytized her religious views in the classroom, teaching J.D. and the other students to believe in superstition and magic. Defendant Mastoloni constantly discussed spirituality, numerology, astrology, dreams, mysticism, looking for signs, angels, symbols, synchronicity, negativity, seeking the truth, and death. Although Defendant Mastoloni would preach her religious ideas to the whole class, she took a special interest in J.D. Defendant Mastoloni had already converted the two older Doe sisters, and now she was looking to add the third sister to her coven. . . .
At Defendant Mastoloni’s urging, E.D. and L.D. asked J.D. to come to Wellesley during her April break, luring her there by telling her that they would take her to a music concert. J.D. was looking forward to seeing if she could find out some information that would reveal the cause of B.D.’s and L.D.’s bizarre behavior. …
When J.D. retuned after that week, she was cold, lacked affect, and was behaving just like E.D. and L.D. …
When E.D. and L.D. came home from school at the end of May 2013, all three girls were isolating and fearful. They spent countless hours on their laptops, or reading books about mysticism, astrology, dreams, and Carl Jung. . . .
Finally, after a confrontation with her mother, the youngest sister broke down and started explaining:
J.D. began to reveal the details of what had occurred. Jane and John learned that J.D. did not attend any concert while she was visiting her sisters at Wellesley. For the entire week she was there, J.D. was under the total and constant control of her sister, E.D., who was acting at the direction of Defendant Mastoloni. . . . E.D. barraged J.D. with thoughts that turned J.D. against her parents . . .
Most importantly, however, J.D. revealed how Defendant Mastoloni had orchestrated the entire ordeal. . . .
After J.D. returned from Wellesley, Defendants Mastoloni, Kessler, Esposito, and Sullivan used E.D. and L.D. to relentlessly maintain and intensify their control over J.D. E.D. began making bizarre comments to J.D., in an effort to reorganize J.D.’s thinking. For instance, E.D. discussed with J.D. how education was not that important. E.D. told J.D. that she did not want to have children, but that she wanted to give birth to feel the pain. E.D. also told J.D. that she did not want to get married, but if she lived with someone they would have separate bedrooms with one room being strictly for sex. . . .
It was not until J.D. broke free that Jane and John understood that their three daughters had been subjected to religious indoctrination at Avon High School . . .

Here is the full text of the lawsuit:

Mastoloni Et Al Complaint by ABoyd8