A week and a half or so back, the BBC released a report claiming to link a murder case and a terrorism case to a "Satanic occult forum." I've posted several articles here on Augoeides about how genuine "occult crime" is very rare and usually a case of overreach by investigators, and in fact the two cases named are significant in the sense that they have some actual occult connections. The laughable law enforcement training video referenced in this article is a classic example of what police were being told to look for back in the day.
However, the BBC report then dives into the classic moral panic trope suggesting that many, many people (besides the handful they identify) are being brainwashed by these forums and so forth. It's a very small step from that to "we need to censor you online because you're posting occult stuff on your blog and that's dangerous." The previous Cameron administration in fact did attempt to censor "esoteric content" from web users in the UK before the policy was struck down by the courts, so the notion is not even a little farfetched.
The BBC has uncovered new evidence about the teenage killer of Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, the two sisters murdered last summer in a Wembley park in London.
Danyal Hussein was a member of a web forum, run by an American self-styled black magician, whose instructions about demonic pacts mirror steps taken by the killer.
The American has encouraged murder in some of his writings, including for a violent Satanic group that’s been cited as an influence on seven young men convicted of neo-Nazi terror offences in the UK over the past two years.
The forum referred to in the report is run by E. A. Koetting of "Become a Living God" fame. Personally, I'm not a fan of Koetting. Much of the stuff he talks about, including "sacrifices" and the like, seems more intended to shock than enlighten. Some of the material he covers is accurate, but it's neither groundbreaking nor exceptional. Basically, as I see it, the free material here on Augeides is better than the material he charges for if you really want to learn to be an effective magical practitioner. It should be noted that that the "pact" included in the image above totally didn't work.
At the same time, the report conflates several factors in a manner reminiscent of a moral panic, and regardless of how you or I might feel about Koetting's work, it's important to keep the two issues separate. There's no question that Danyal Hussein is a bad guy. He stabbed two strangers to death. There's also no question that he was interested in the occult and particularly BALG. This is a noteworthy point because real occult crimes are very rare and his might actually be at least partially motived by his occult beliefs. But instead of that perspective, the report goes on about how "too many teens" are being "radicalized" by online Satanism.
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