Christian Terrorists Arrested

Last week, three Christian terrorists were arrested in Kansas. The three men planned to launch a massive attack on a mosque and a housing complex inhabited by Somali immigrants. They called themselves "crusaders," and the attack was clearly motivated by their hatred of Muslims. Some media outlets, though, were slow to call this what it clearly was - a terrorist plot - because the alleged perpetrators are Christian.

On Friday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced that it had arrested three white men, Curtis Allen, Gavin Wright and Patrick Stein, who as part of a militia group called the Crusaders planned to bomb a housing complex and mosque in Garden City, Kansas. Allen, Wright and Stein had stockpiled 2,000 pounds of ammunition and numerous homemade bombs to conduct the attack.

Their intended victims were Somali immigrants. In information gathered by the FBI, Stein, the apparent ringleader, told his followers, “If you’re a Muslim I’m going to enjoy shooting you in the head.” Stein also wanted his confederates to “if you start using your bow on them cockroaches, make sure you dip them in pig’s blood before you shoot them.”

The destruction and murder would have been total. Allen, Wright and Stein planned to spare no one from their hateful wrath; babies and children would be killed along with adults. Stein told his fellow militia members, “When we go on operations there’s no leaving anyone behind, even if it’s a 1-year-old. I’m serious. I guarantee if I go on a mission those little fuckers are going bye-bye.”

It should be completely obvious that this planned attack, had it succeeded, would have constituted an act of terrorism. A terrorist doesn't have to be Muslim to be a terrorist. Looking at terror attacks around the world, the real root problem is intolerant religious fanaticism, regardless of the religion that a terrorist group claims to follow. Really, how different is a "crusader" from a "jihadist?"

Radical Christian terrorists and radical Islamic terrorists are basically the exact same thing - people seeking to kill those who don't share their beliefs. It's about time that they were universally recognized as such.

Witches! All the Way Down!

Evanglist and potato soup huckster Jim Bakker's show is back in the news here on Augoeides, and for once he's not even the craziest guy on it. For a recent episode, that honor goes to his guest, Richard Maginnis of the Family Research Council. After Bakker went off on one of his usual tirades about the Obama administration favoring Muslims, apparently because the administration has refused to violate the constitution by barring Muslims from all political posts, Maginnis added that the "senior leadership" in this country is being influenced by witches. Because of course it is.

Bakker had a segment on his show yesterday where he brought up President Obama‘s recent nomination of a Muslim federal judge as proof that his administration is giving “preferential treatment” to Muslims… which is an absurd notion. As if Abid R. Qureshi was nominated because he was a Muslim and not because his credentials are impeccable. Meanwhile, Christians make up every branch and twig and leaf of government, but Bakker doesn’t think there’s anything weird about that.

Anyway. That wasn’t even the worst part of the segment. His guest, Robert Maginnis, a senior fellow with the Family Research Council and a former Army lieutenant colonel, responded to Bakker’s claim with an even more ludicrous one:

"… I know that there’s demonic forces in that city. I have personally met people that refer to themselves as witches, people that say they advise the senior leadership of the country. We invite within the federal government people to advise us, and often some of those advisers, I think, have evil motivations, things that you and I would not approve of."

Now I do want to point something out here. To a fundamentalist like Maginnis, somebody who reads the Bible different that he does is a Satanist, and Satanists and witches are the same thing. So most likely, the "witches" he's talking about are Episcopalians, or Methodists, or Presbyterians. Don't believe me? Hillary Clinton is a devout Methodist and these folks have been calling her a witch from day one. And isn't Donald Trump a Presbyterian?

Seriously, though, I don't know of any Pagan or occultist who might describe themselves as a witch in any senior advisory position whatsoever. Look what a stink gets put up when a Muslim gets nominated for something. Can you imagine how bad it would be for an actual Pagan? Legally there's no religious test, but for minority religions like Paganism there might as well be.

Sadly, though, the Family Research Council was quite influential during the second Bush administration. Because unfortunately, there's no similar test for reactionary fanatics.

Leaked Daesh Documents Really, Really Boring

Daesh, the Islamic State group currently waging a civil war in Iraq and Syria, has shown itself to be pretty effective at managing propaganda, portraying itself as an organization of religious purists fighting for their Islamic faith. However, continuing with Friday's "banality of evil" theme - or alleged evil, in the case of the Bohemian Grove - I came across this article posted on the aptly-named website War is Boring.

According to the article, a cache of leaked Daesh documents show the group to be little more than another petty bureaucracy. Not only that, despite the image put forth of a principled band of holy warriors, it seems that the group's recruiters did not particularly care how well new recruits understood Islam or how obedient to the faith they appeared to be. Much of the time, the questions regarding Sharia law and religious obedience were simply left blank.

The bulk of the files are personnel documents, a kind of job application or file a recruiter fills out when a fighter first joins Daesh. It’s basic — just 23 questions that tells readers all about the new recruit.

Name, address, blood type and birthday are all required. So is information about the wannabe jihadi’s family. The Islamic State also wants to know how its recruits made their way into the Caliphate, which routes they took and who recruited them.

The more interesting questions come later when the registrar must explain the applicant’s level of understanding of Sharia law, how obedient they appear and what special skills they possess. The people doing the paperwork often left these spaces blank.

Which is hilarious and humanizing. I immediately imagined two normal schmucks sitting at a table in a dry desert town. “Have you heard of Sharia?” the interviewer asks.

“No,” the other replies. “But I want to fight.”

“That’s OK,” the first responds. “I’ll just put you down as a ‘beginner.’”

So it would seem that in the end, Daesh is just another fighting force trying to carve out their own piece of the Middle East. The leaders of the group may consider it the vanguard of a new Islamic Caliphate, but as far as the recruits doing the actual fighting, how they see Daesh is anyone's guess. The personnel files sure don't help to make much sense of their attitudes, though the recruiters themselves don't seem to care much about who they're bringing in. I suppose they must have quotas or something, which override any real principles.

It leaves me wondering if all of Daesh's atrocities are simply a giant version of the Milgram experiment, in which the foot soldiers go about following orders without question because their commanders absolve them of all responsibility. It's especially easy to tell people that their religion demands they kill a bunch of people if they don't actually understand what their religion has to say about it.

Against Pregnant Hands

Until now I had no idea that the Islamic concept of the afterlife was so weird. Recently Turkish Islamic preacher Mucahid Cihad Han warned on a live television broadcast that in the afterlife, men who masturbate would find themselves with "pregnant hands." Most conservative strands of the Abrahamic monotheistic religions consider masturbation a sin, but this is the first time I've ever come across such a bizarre explanation. How does a hand get pregnant, anyway? I realize that it's the afterlife so this could be a "spiritual pregnancy." But what does that even mean?

According to Hurriyet Daily News, Han was appearing on the TV station 2000 TV when a man rang the station to confess that despite being married, he kept masturbating - even during the holy pilgrimage to Mecca known as Umrah.

Forced to repeat the question several times to the confused preacher, he was eventually advised that the act was forbidden. 'Moreover,' Han said, 'One [saying] states that those who have sexual intercourse with their hands will find their hands pregnant in the afterlife, complaining against them to God over its rights.

'If our viewer was single, I could recommend he marry, but what can I say now?' He later posted on Twitter an interpretation of Islam which he said proved masturbation was forbidden, adding: 'Lets keep ourselves out of trouble.'

While I realize that in the afterlife basic biological constraints don't necessarily exist, this still strikes me as a strange interpretation that just brings up more questions. How many eggs does a hand produce? It's the afterlife, so I suppose that number could be huge. If it's one for every sperm, that means most men will find themselves with a massive infernal legion of the night in the next world. But what if that's the idea? Could someone deliberately generate more "offspring" so as to enter the afterlife with the largest possible army? Because that would be badass.

It's more likely that this is just a bunch of nonsense, even to those who believe that the afterlife is real. In fact, the Christian Bible contains nothing prohibiting masturbation. The story of Onan, which is usually cited, is more about disobeying God and refusing to honor community traditions in favor of self-interest - which many sins have in common. It also sounds like it's not a settled issue in Islam, pregnant hands notwithstanding.

An Anti-Muslim Death Ray?

No, this post is not an April Fools joke, unlike yesterday's post that a number of clueless people apparently failed to get. New York Ku Klux Klan member Glendon Crawford is actually facing trial for designing and attempting to secure funds for an "anti-muslim death ray." If nothing else, the man's stock of super-villain points must be at an all-time high, because his plot sounds like something out of a bad action movie. For that matter, so does his device.

Federal authorities say Crawford, of Hudson, New York, designed a device capable of targeting people with lethal doses of X-ray radiation, but Luibrand argued that government agents instigated, funded, and planned the plot.

The motion claims Crawford approached U.S. Rep. Chris Gibson, a New York Republican, along with a Schenectady synagogue and the Israeli Embassy with his idea to use radiation strong enough to cause illness, which the attorney said his clients learned from high-school level materials found online.

“Crawford planned to create a mobile, remotely operated, radiation-emitting device capable of killing people silently from a distance with lethal doses of ionizing radiation,” the indictment alleges. “Crawford’s intended targets were Muslims, Muslim-related organizations and persons Crawford believed were contributing to the demise of the United States.”

I have to admit, given the complexity of the weapon described in that last paragraph, I find it hard to believe that anything short of a well-funded research team could ever make it work. Yeah, in theory it's simple when you describe it at a high enough level, but so's a full-scale nuclear reactor - you stick uranium rods in a tank of water, the water gets so hot it boils, and you run a turbine with the resulting steam. The complexity is in all the little details and controls and systems that you have to get right in order to avoid a serious accident.

Crawford's defense team claims that he and co-conspirator Eric Feight were was lured into a sting by government agents, who pretended to be interested in funding development of his device and then turned around and arrested them. Feight pleaded guilty to avoid a trial, but Crawford asserts his innocence on the basis that the government sting violated his civil rights. He also argues that he never would have had the resources to even attempt to construct the device without the financial support that the agents offered as part of the sting.

While Crawford's intent was certainly that of a terrorist, I also have been of the opinion for a long time that these sorts of sting operations need to stop, or at least be scaled back. I can think of several cases over the last decade or so in which incompetent people arrested on terrorism charges never could have done anything without help from government agents, but then wound up in prison for agreeing to work with them. Does the government really come across so few credible terrorist threats that it has to manufacture its own?

Earth is Stationary Because Airplanes

Creationists get themselves into so much trouble because their idea of science basically consists of trying to tease out meaning from religious texts rather than, say, actually performing experiments. This mindset can be found in many fundamentalist religious traditions, and is not limited to Christianity. Recently a Saudi fundamentalist Islamic scholar claimed that the Earth is stationary because that's what the Koran tells him. Oh, and there's also a really confusing bit about airplanes.

Sheikh Bandar al-Khaibari is believed to have been speaking at a university lecture in the United Arab Emirates when a student asked him whether the Earth rotates or is stationary.

The Islamic scholar quickly replies 'stationary and does not move', before launching into a long-winded and confusing explanation that appears to the suggest that if the Earth was moving, airliners would never be able to reach their destination.

After telling the student that the Earth does not rotate, Sheikh al-Khaibari attempts to back up his argument with religious statements and quotes from other Islamic clerics.

Perhaps struggling to make his argument understood, the religious lecturer then attempts to use a visual aid to illustrate how difficult it would be for airliners to travel if the Earth is spinning.

Of course, anybody who knows anything about science realizes that this explanation is completely daft because when the plane is stationary on the ground it's moving at the same speed as the Earth rotates, and when it takes off the engines modify that velocity. The explanation offered by al-Khaibari seems to assume that the moment the plane breaks connection with the Earth its velocity should instantly drop to zero relative to that of the planet, which is obviously impossible.

In fact, if there was a way to make that happen, we could exploit the principle to generate limitless free energy. Not only that, it would make bouncy castles and pogo sticks incredibly dangerous.

So Muslims Discovered America?

On November 15th Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan gave a speech at a meeting of Latin American Muslim leaders challenging Christopher Columbus' supposed discovery of the Americas. Historians now agree that Columbus was not the first European to see or set foot in the Americas. However, Erdogan went on to explain that Muslims made contact with the Americas in 1178 AD, and therefore the Muslim world should be credited with the "discovery." While the Arabic world was more advanced than most of Europe in the twelfth century and a voyage from one of those countries would not have been strictly impossible, we know of no records indicating that one was ever undertaken.

Quoth Erdogan: “Contacts between Latin America and Islam date back to the 12th century. Muslims discovered America in 1178, not Christopher Columbus….Columbus mentioned the existence of a mosque on a hill on the Cuban coast.” The conservative Turk referred to a mention in Columbus’ diary of a hill in Cuba shaped like a mosque.

Spain was busy ejecting Muslims from Spanish land, pushing them back to the Strait of Gibraltar. The Moorish Kingdom of Granada surrendered to Spanish King Ferdinand V in 1492, the year that lives in infamy among the surviving Taino people in the Caribbean. Columbus would have known what a mosque looked like, but finding Muslims in the “New World” would have been a terrible calamity, since his King was at war with Muslims and his “right” to claim the land and enslave the occupants was based on the Doctrine of Discovery.

Erdogan’s remarks were met with derision among academics and quickly became a partisan political issue in Turkey. On November 18, The Guardian reported that Erdogan was doubling down, quoting him, “very respected scientists in Turkey and in the world…supported his claim. Some youth of our country have begun objecting to this without doing any research or paying attention to discussions.”

There are two serious problems here with Erdogan's assertion. The first and most significant is that America was actually "discovered" by the ancestors of modern day Native Americans, not Europeans. While the dark ages were going on in Europe, both North and South America were already populated by plenty of people. The second problem is that even if Muslims reached the Americas in 1178 AD, the Vikings did it around 1000 AD. They even established a settlement in what is now Newfoundland. The first Viking known to have landed in the Americas was Leif Erickson, who converted to Christianity just prior to his voyage. However, Erickson was following the voyage of Bjarni Herjólfsson, a Norse pagan who is believed to be the first European to see North America.

So the first European to see the Americas was pagan, and the first European to set foot on the continent was a recent Christian convert who himself grew up pagan. Christopher Columbus' voyages may have kicked off European colonization of the Americas, but they took place nearly five hundred years later. It's not clear who Erdogan's "respected scientists" are, and if he's going to make extraordinary claims like this he should at the very least name his sources.

Monster Energy Conspiracist At It Again

When I posted the video explaining the Satanic nature of Monster energy drinks, I figured it was a one-off. Christian conspiracy theorists believe a lot of ridiculous stuff, it just usually doesn't wind up caught on video. But as it turns out, the conspiracist in the video, a woman named Christine Weick, is back in the news this week.

On Friday, she disrupted a Muslim prayer event being held at the National Cathedral by admonishing those present to worship only Jesus Christ because America was "founded on Christian principles." She was then quickly escorted out of the building by security, as shown in the video above. Dangerous Minds reports:

So this is not Weick’s first or even second brush with notoriety, it is (at least) her third—she got a Slushie thrown in her face in front of a news crew on Mother’s Day as she held a sign reading, “Thank your mom today for not being gay!”—we just didn’t know her name until now. In the sub-Drudge reader sector of wingnuts within wingnuts, Weick, who lives out of her car and has authored the book Explain This! A Verse by Verse Explanation of the Book of Revelation, is already being held up as a Christian martyr “hero” and not someone who needs to be fucking medicated, stat.

She claims that it was a “thumbs up” from a “strange” clapping woman along her 400 mile drive from Tennessee to the nation’s capitol that she took as a sign from God convincing her that she was doing the right thing. Weick’s husband apparently divorced her over her goofy beliefs. More from WND (where the comments are pure mental midget genius!):

“It was a situation in my life, how God yanked every anchor in my life over the last five years, just everything that would keep a normal woman, a normal mother, at home just got yanked out from under me,” she said. “I have a son and a daughter, and they disowned me. I took a stand against gay marriage and I lost them. That is my heartache. And it hurts me so much. And I wonder what they think now when they see me on the news.”

Weick said she doesn’t know what her next “assignment” will be, but she knows now she can tackle almost anything. “I told the Lord last night, ‘OK, you can take me now,’ but I don’t know,” she said. “I think He may have other plans for me, per Jeremiah 29: 11.”

Oh Lord, please do not take her. Christine Weick is one of the very BEST Christians in America. Maybe THE best. What a fine example of a good Christian to point to (at?). Time will tell what plans God has for this zany lady, but all I can say is watch out Victoria Jackson, you’ve got fierce competition in the Christian dingbat department.

"What's 'Oops?' Don't Say 'Oops!'"

Here's how not to go about securing your reputation as a miracle worker. Last week a Pakistani Sufi holy man (called a pir) claimed that he could resurrect a dead man. One of his followers volunteered to be killed and raised from the dead. Remarkably, the holy man proceeded to do just that - except the "resurrection" part didn't go as planned. The would-be miracle worker was arrested by police, and now faces murder charges.

A Saddar police spokesman said Muhammad Sabir, a pir of village Mubarakabad in Bahawalnagar, gained popularity over the last five years for his ability to perform ‘miracles’. He said on Tuesday, he announced that he could breathe life back into a dead man. The pir gave the condition that the victim must be married and have children. Sabir said 40-year-old Muhammad Niaz, a daily wage worker and father of six children, volunteered for the miracle.

On Wednesday, Niaz was placed on a table in a square and his hands and legs were bound. The police spokesman said Sabir then sliced his throat as people looked on. Meanwhile, an anonymous caller informed the police about ‘the miracle.’ The spokesman by the time police reached, Niaz had died. Witnesses said Sabir uttered some words to bring him back to life. They said when he realized his ‘miracle’ had not worked, he tried to flee.

Now if I wanted to kill someone with the intention of bringing them back, cutting their throat is the last way I would do it. The problems are (1) magick can't create blood out of nowhere, and (2) even if it could, the new blood would immediately drain out of the body and the resurrected subject would die all over again. I would want to go with some sort of asphyxiation, like smothering or drowning. That way, if the body can be restarted, there are no wounds that need to be sealed. Then I could use my magical powers in conjunction with my Red Cross CPR training to revive them.

For bonus miracle points, if the subject were killed by prolonged immersion in very cold water I might even be able to revive them a half an hour or so later. Granted, a doctor could do the same, and I wonder if the ancient idea of "breathing life" into a person comes from a much earlier culture working out the basics of CPR and passing it along as "esoteric wisdom." After all, the method is fairly intuitive - when someone isn't breathing, breathe for them - and you really can revive someone from clinical death that way. They just can't have been dead for very long.

No Muslims on Mars?

In an effort to spur interplanetary colonization, Dutch company Mars One is planning a mission to Mars in 2023. The catch is that while the technology exists to get travelers there, without some major breakthroughs between now and then it will be a one-way trip. Mars doesn't have the infrastructure that would allow colonists to build a return rocket, so anyone who opts to go may very well be stuck there for the rest of their lives. This doesn't sit well with the General Authority of Islamic Affairs and Endowment in the United Arab Emirates, which has issued a fatwa against Muslims participating in the Mars One mission.

Promoting or being involved in a one-way trip to the Red Planet is prohibited in Islam, a fatwa committee under the General Authority of Islamic Affairs and Endowment in the UAE has ruled.

“Such a one-way journey poses a real risk to life, and that can never be justified in Islam,” the committee said. “There is a possibility that an individual who travels to planet Mars may not be able to remain alive there, and is more vulnerable to death.”

Whoever opts for this “hazardous trip”, the committee said, is likely to perish for no “righteous reason”, and thus will be liable to a “punishment similar to that of suicide in the Hereafter”.

The committee, presided by Professor Dr Farooq Hamada, said: “Protecting life against all possible dangers and keeping it safe is an issue agreed upon by all religions and is clearly stipulated in verse 4/29 of the Holy Quran: Do not kill yourselves or one another. Indeed, Allah is to you ever Merciful.”

The one-way nature of the mission would give me pause as well, but as a Thelemite my opinion is that if somebody wants to go its their own business. It also sounds as if the fatwa may be lifted once a suitable technology is developed for a return trip. But until then, the result is likely to be fewer Muslims in the initial wave of colonization. That is, of course, if the mission manages to get off the ground at all. Nothing like it has ever been attempted, and it remains to be seen if the organizers can really meet their commitments by the target date.

Mars One has issued a response to the fatwa. It can be found here.

Islam Not a Religion?

The last time I covered Pat Robertson here on Augoeides, I found myself amazed that his comments regarding creationism actually made sense. However, apparently another such moment was too much to hope for. On a recent episode of Robertson's 700 Club television program the evangelist made the bizarre claim that Islam - the world's second largest religion behind Christianity - is in fact not a religion. It remains to be seem if he ever will articulate a coherent definition that would allow him to explain what features his form of Christianity has that Islam lacks.

"Every time you look up — these are angry people, it’s almost like it’s demonic that is driving them to kill and to maim and to destroy and to blow themselves up," Robertson said of Islam. "It's a religion of chaos." He went on to say, "I hardly think to call it a religion, it’s more of — well, it’s an economic and political system with a religious veneer."

This is hardly the first time Robertson has spoken out on Islam. ThinkProgress points to an incident, after Major Nidal Malik massacred his fellow soldiers in the 2009 Fort Hood shooting, when Robertson claimed not only that Islam is "not a religion," but also that he sees it as “a violent political system bent on the overthrow of the governments of the world and world domination."

Robertson has apparently confused "Islam" with the extremist form of Wahhabism that inspires terrorist groups like Al Qaida, completely failing to comprehend that Islam as a whole has something like 1.6 billion followers and if they were all violent terrorists engaging in asymmetric warfare we would be totally doomed. More predictably, he also appears to believe that anything other than Christianity is not a religion but rather, well, something else - which renders the whole concept of religious freedom pretty much moot.

Russian "Mole People" Cult Unearthed

Survivalists spend a great deal of time preparing for a future in which they imagine huddling in a bunker with stacks of gold and "survival seeds" will become a reasonable lifestyle. Recently a Russian Islamic cult was discovered putting this way of life to the test. Members of the cult and their families resided with their leader in an underground bunker for more than a decade, with some of the younger children having never seen the light of day.

The group - known as the "Fayzarahmanist" sect - was named after its 83-year-old organizer Fayzrahman Satarov, who declared himself a prophet and his house an independent Islamic state, according to a report by state TV channel Vesti.

Satarov was described as a former deputy to a Sunni Islamic cleric in the 1970s. His followers were encouraged to read his manuscripts and most were banned from leaving their eight-storey underground bunker which had been dug in the basement of a building, Vesti said.

Prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation into the sect and have said it will be disbanded if it continues its illegal activities, such as stopping its members from seeking medical assistance or education.

Contrary to what you might expect from certain popular films, these Russian mole people are neither mutants nor cannibals, but merely normal underground dwellers - or, I suppose, as normal as one can expect underground dwelling religious fanatics to be. While I support religious freedom, it seems to me that any organization this extreme and controlling is pretty much by definition dangerous to its own members at the very least, if not to outsiders as well.

Wingnuts Outraged Normal Muslims Exist

I'm usually not a big fan of using the term "wingnut" to describe people who hold extremely conservative political beliefs. I'm not a conservative myself, but I can nonetheless see that all too often the term is used as a smear that communicates little real information besides vehement disagreement with its target. However, the group behind this latest controversy really worked hard to earn the name. It's not just that they're very conservative, but also that they're at the same time unbelievably stupid, ignorant, or both.

So here's the story. The Learning Channel recently began running a series called "All-American Muslim" about Muslim families living in the United States. The biggest takeaway from the series is that just like American Christians, American Muslims are actually pretty normal. This simple fact completely incensed a conservative group called the Florida Family Association, which went on to successfully lobby many companies including the Lowe's Hardware chain into pulling their ads from the show. The basis of the complaint appears to be that since Muslims are terrorists, none of the people on the show are real Muslims. The stupid, it burns.

Lowe's pulled the advertising after groups including the Florida Family Association complained to the company. In its letter, the family group wrote that the show was not portraying Muslim Americans realistically. The letter also stated: "Clearly this program is attempting to manipulate Americans into ignoring the threat of jihad and to influence them to believe that being concerned about the jihad threat would somehow victimize these nice people in this show."

The idea that all Muslims are inherently terrorists, which is what this letter clearly implies, is so dumb that it barely merits a response. However, the success of the Florida Family Association's campaign unfortunately demands one. Nobody is denying that Muslim terrorists exist, but there is a huge difference between liberal American Muslims and followers of the Taliban or Al Qaida. Furthermore, as with most religions Muslim extremists represent a small but admittedly determined minority. I might as well declare that all Christians share the beliefs of Hutaree, which would be equally ridiculous.

Hexing on Facebook

The chairman of Malaysia's Islamic Medicine Association recently warned people not to post their pictures online at social media sites like Facebook, because those photographs could allow unscrupulous magicians to cast spells upon them.

Users of social media sites should not post their pictures online as they could be used for witchcraft, said Kelantan Darussyifa' Islamic Medicine Association chairman Zaki Ya.

He said that djin (spirits) are able to “connect” with humans through the Internet, including Facebook, Sinar Harian reported.

While this is technically accurate whenever photos are involved, in my experience there aren't that many capable magicians out there casting spells on random Facebook users. Even if there were, digital photographs are pretty weak as magical links go. A regular photograph that has captured waves of light bouncing off a subject can act as both a similarity link and a contagion link, while a digital photograph has to operate on similarity alone because there's no direct connection when the image consists of pure information.

“Once, I treated someone who became delirious because a spell had been cast on him while he was surfing the Internet,” said Zaki.

“A few days ago, I received an SMS from a father asking me to help his son who refused to go to school.

“The father suspected that his son had been influenced by a djin over the Internet,” he said when met at the USM Traditional Islamic Medicine Clinic in Penang.

He said the boy would create a fuss every time his parents forbade him from using the Internet and would even threaten to kill himself.

See, to me this last case doesn't sound like possession or anything remotely similar. It sounds like the kid is just a brat, and the fact is that children are perfectly capable of behaving badly even when they're not being attacked by spirits. My three-year-old sometimes throws tantrums when she doesn't get what she wants, but I expect her to grow out of it soon. If this boy is using the Internet I'm guessing that he's substantially older and never did.

UPDATE: Jack has more on digital links, and how you can go about blocking or shielding yourself from them. Jason has a related post up as well.

Magick in the Middle East

I suppose it's no surprise to see this article discussing the widespread belief in magick throughout the Middle East. After all, Saudi Arabia is the only country I know of that has its own anti-witchcraft squad and witchcraft persecutions are common in the region. What I was not quite aware of, though, is the degree to which accepting the existence of magick is an integral part of Islamic belief. In Christianity and Judaism there seems to be a lot more flexibility on the issue, especially in Western nations. Whether or not that's a good thing is open to interpretation - I work magick so I know that it exists, but at the same time there's a lot to be said for living in a country where I'm not going to be hounded out of my home, assaulted, or even killed because of my practices. If I were living in Saudi Arabia, for example, I would need to keep my practices secret for fear of attracting attention from both my neighbors and the authorities.

Belief in black magic runs deep in Saudi society. The issue was raised last month when the quasi-legislative body Shoura Council granted permission for Moroccan women to work as maids in Saudi households. Hundreds of Saudi women complained to the Council that granting Moroccan maids permission to work was tantamount to allowing the use of black magic in their homes to steal their husbands. Saudi wives complained the issue was not lacking trust in their husbands, but their men were powerless to ward off spells.

While greeted with skepticism in western societies, Saudis would no more question the existence of black magic than they would Islam. Two surahs (chapters) in the Qur’an under Al Mi’wadhatyan address black magic and are often recited during or after prayer. Simply, part of being a Muslim is believing in the existence of magic.

In April of this year, members of the Saudi Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice underwent special training in the Eastern Province to investigate black magic crimes.

Although also found in Christianity and Judaism, casting spells is particularly common in Oman, Sudan, Yemen, Morocco and Indonesia. Turkey is a secular Muslim country, but protection against evil eye is deeply rooted in virtually all aspects of daily life. Tools of witchcraft include using lizards, dead birds, photographs, hair, thread, dirt, blood and red ink. Hiding places to place the “spell” may be in bedrooms and under beds. Written spells generally contain the intended victim’s name and one or two words to state the intention to do harm.

This article also answers a question I asked in the original anti-witchcraft squad article - if magick is officially forbidden in Islam, how does the anti-witchcraft squad go about breaking spells? The answer is that there are particular passages from the Qur’an that are believed to counter spells, so these passages are "read with reflection" in order to mitigate or remove the effects of negative magical influences. Which I would refer to as magick in its own right, of course, but as in many other religious traditions Muslims draw a line between magical operations that are sanctioned and those that are not.

"The Jaws of the Wolf"

Somebody should turn this story into a new television pilot.

When witchcraft strikes, never fear. The Anti-Witchcraft Squad of Saudi Arabia is on the case! Bonus points for centering the show around an older traditional Muslim agent paired up with a hip, impulsive youngster that he can't stand but who nevertheless manages to save the day over and over again. Because of all cop shows ever. Here's the pitch:

When the severed head of a wolf wrapped in women's lingerie turned up near the city of Tabouk in northern Saudi Arabia this week, authorities knew they had another case of witchcraft on their hands, a capital offence in the ultra-conservative desert kingdom.

Agents of the country’s Anti-Witchcraft Unit were quickly dispatched and set about trying to break the spell that used the beast’s head.

Wow, that sounds like a tough case. Hard to film, too, since I'm not sure you can even show women's lingerie on TV in Saudi Arabia. A severed wolf's head, on the other hand, is no problem. As an aside, what's with all the spells involving dead things lately, like weasels and goats? Could this be the start of some sort of pattern?

In the case of the wolf's head, the Anti-Witchcraft Unit in Tabouk was able to break the spell. The Saudi daily Okaz reported on Monday that the unknown family that had fallen victim to the spell had been "liberated from the jaws of the wolf.”

Whew! That's a relief. Clearly the magick of the Anti-Witchcraft Squad is mighty! But that raises a question - doesn't Islam ban magick? So where is the squad finding its sorcerers? Given the legal climate in Saudi Arabia I can't blame anyone for wanting to keep a low profile, but if counter-spells are being set in motion somebody must be casting them.

All joking aside, the disturbing part of this story is that a modern government has set up an agency specifically charged with persecuting magicians. Odds are a lot of the folks the squad rounds up won't be guilty of anything but having unusual spiritual beliefs, and since "witchcraft" is a capital crime in Saudi Arabia those beliefs could get them killed.

Ahmadinejad Calls For Iranian Witchcraft Study

Since this spring a power struggle has been going on in Iran between president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. As an "Islamic republic," the structure of Iran's government is such that the power of the elected president is substantially limited and much executive authority rests with the nation's spiritual leader, Khamenei. The split between the two seems surprising, given that Khamenei backed Ahmadinejad in the 2009 presidential election that was reputedly wrought with irregularities. But back in May several Ahmadinejad associates were arrested and charged with using magick to further his political career.

Several people said to be close to the president and his chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, have been arrested in recent days and charged with being "magicians" and invoking djinns (spirits).

Ayandeh, an Iranian news website, described one of the arrested men, Abbas Ghaffari, as "a man with special skills in metaphysics and connections with the unknown worlds".

If any of the accused were really invoking the Djinn, I'm curious how common copies of the Picatrix are in Iran. As far as I know that's the principle grimoire used for such work, though there may be other Persian or Arabic texts with which I and other Western magicians would be unfamiliar. Ahmadinejad has responded to the charges leveled by Khamenei's Guardian Council by calling for a public study on Iranian witchcraft.

One of the Council's favorite tactics is to accuse Ahmadinejad's allies of practicing black magic and witchcraft. Ahmadinejad has responded by backing a public study of these practices in Iran, apparently in the belief that this will implicate some Islamic conservatives, or at least provide more exposure of the fiscal corruption so common in the families of senior clergy.

While I recognize that backing the study has strong political ramifications for Ahmadinejad's career, I hope this is more than a stunt and will lead to some genuine research. At least according to folklore, there is a long tradition of magick in the Middle East that remains largely hidden and I would love to take a look at an objective academic analysis of its inner workings. It also makes me wonder - does Iran's Guardian Council use magick for its own ends? If so, how far back does it go? Magical assistance would certainly help to explain some of the events surrounding the 1978 Iranian revolution.

"Boobquake" Narrowly Misses Taiwan

As a followup to last Tuesday's post, Monday April 26th has arrived and brought with it a 6.5-magnitude earthquake that struck off the southeast coast of Taiwan. In response to the claim of an Iranian cleric that "immodesty" causes earthquakes, thousands of women had agreed to wear revealing clothing today in order to scientifically test this seemingly ludicrous hypothesis.

The 6.5-magnitude quake hit at 10:59 a.m. (0259 GMT), 195 miles (295 kilometers) off the southern Taiwan city of Taitung at a depth of 6.2 miles (10 kilometers), the U.S. Geological Survey said. The agency's initial report had put the quake's magnitude at 6.9.

Fortunately the quake struck far enough offshore that while its effects were felt on the island, no injuries or property damage have been reported. The quake also does not appear to have triggered a tsunami, another piece of good news.

In Taipei, buildings swayed for up to 20 seconds when the quake hit, but police said there were no reports of casualties or damage anywhere on the island. No tsunami alert was issued.

In northern Keelung county, 18 miles (30 kilometers) northeast of Taipei, the tremor caused little new damage at the site of a massive landslide, police said. On Sunday, a hillside collapsed onto a three-lane highway following several days of rain, burying three cars.

The article also notes that had the quake been larger and closer to shore the result could have been much worse.

Earthquakes frequently rattle Taiwan but most are minor and cause little or no damage.

However, a 7.6-magnitude earthquake in central Taiwan in 1999 killed more than 2,300 people.

So you never know, perhaps "immodesty" is more dangerous than any reasonable person had previously thought - or maybe it's just a big coincidence and the whole thing is absolutely ridiculous. As with most scientific puzzles, further research is probably necessary.

Immodesty Causes Earthquakes?

According to a senior Iranian cleric seismologists have it all wrong. Earthquakes aren't caused by tectonic plates sliding along fault lines or anything godless and scientific like that. They're caused by immodest women!

Amid all the recent speculation over what only feels like an unusual number of earthquakes around the world, an Iranian cleric has offered a novel explanation for the source of seismic activity: promiscuous women. Unless Iranians "take refuge in religion" and "adapt our lives to Islam's moral codes," they can expect to be "buried under the rubble," said Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi, a senior cleric, during Friday prayers in Tehran. As usual, these moral responsibilities are projected onto women's bodies: "Many women who do not dress modestly ... lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which increases earthquakes," he said.

Fellow magicians, do you know what this means? All we have to do to win a magical war with Iran is drop a bunch of female paratroopers over there and have them walk along the country's many fault lines in short skirts. The entire nation will be leveled in days!



Actually this isn't a photo of an earthquake but rather the recent volcanic eruption in Iceland, included for sheer awesomeness. But maybe immodest women cause volcanic eruptions as well. Granted, Iceland's climate is rather cool for skimpy clothing, but we can't let logic get in the way of throwing ridiculous accusations around. After all, Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi certainly didn't.

UPDATE: In the Facebook discussion of this article, I was informed that on Monday, April 26th thousands of women all over the world are planning on wearing revealing clothing in an effort to destroy either the planet or Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi. The campaign appears to have gone viral, and more than 30,000 women have joined in on Facebook. Isn't science marvelous?