Not Enough Hate Crimes? Make Them Up



What's going on in the - we believed free - world?

If you look around you, you see more and more people forbidden to enter a country, put in jail or out of business just for expressing their opinion. I agree that nobody should publicly insult individuals or groups with no good reason, but there's a fine line between exposing a wrong-doing and offending the wrong-doer.

In Britain, the new counterjihad party Liberty GB's Radio Officer Tim Burton is on trial for calling Fiyaz Mujhal on Twitter “a lying Muslim scumbag”. Mr Mujhal, founder and director of Tell MAMA (Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks), had been revealed to report misleading facts and figures about presumed "Islamophobic" incidents and his organisation's public funding had been discontinued because of it.

American campaigners Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, international icons of resistance to Islamisation, have been barred from Britain exactly because they oppose Islamisation.

Now I read that in the country of the maple leaf the Free Dominion website, which is the Canadian equivalent of the USA's Free Republic, for which I write, has 5 days ago been put practically out of business by a court order.

Apparently Free Dominion offended Richard Warman, a "human rights" lawyer nicknamed "Canada’s Hatefinder General" by Mark Steyn, who describes his operational style thus:

As eventually emerged at a Canadian "Human Rights" Tribunal hearing, he adopts Internet disguises and posts as a "hatemonger" on so-called "hate sites", and then sues those sites. Very foolishly, the Canadian courts have rewarded him for playing dress-up Nazi.

Hence the pessimistic forecast of Free Dominion's Mark and Connie Fournier:

This means we are barred for life from ever operating a public forum or a blog (even about cookie recipes) where the public can comment. If we do so, any one of Warman’s handful of supporters could, and probably would, use a common proxy server to avoid being traced, plant a negative comment about Warman on our site, and we would both be charged with contempt of court.

Steyn also says:

Mr. Warman joined Stormfront and other “white supremacist” websites and posted copious amounts of hate speech of his own, describing, for example, Jewish members of cabinet as “scum” and gays as a “cancer.” That’s how “hateful” Canada is: there’s so little “hate” out there that the country’s most famous Internet Nazi is a taxpayer-funded civil servant.

This reminds me of a similar comment by Tim Burton about Tell MAMA's alleged augmentation of anti-Muslim crimes described above:

Apparently – believe it or not – there is not enough 'online hate crime' to go round and some more 'online hate crime' had to be urgently manufactured to justify the hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money needed to sustain the organisation.

Another example of political use of what should be the justice system is for the purpose of persecuting (as well as prosecuting) political adversaries. One of the most reported cases of unfairly applying the law to attack political foes was that of the IRS (the American tax authorities) that a year ago admitted to singling out the Tea Party and other like-minded groups.

In the US, government departments and agencies use

their powers selectively to chastise their political enemies. In a hyper-regulatory state, there are laws against everything, and everyone is guilty of being in breach of at least 300 of them at any hour of the day. I have no use for Dinesh D'Souza, for example, but it seems obvious that he's been set up as this season's Benghazi video maker. There are gazillions of $20,000 campaign-finance infractions across America, but the only guy that's been singled out is the fellow who made a hit anti-Obama movie. As John Hayward puts it, he's been

...busted for doing 59 in a 55-mph campaign-finance zone in your little compact car, while huge semi trucks full of political cash blast past you at a hundred miles an hour without the cops batting an eye.

D'Souza's enemies are gloating. As is the habit in the American system, he will most likely be prevailed upon to cop a plea in return for a reduced sentence. And everyone else will get the message: If you make a film or write a book attacking Obama, make sure it's a flop - or anyway not so big a hit it catches the regime's eye.

D'Souza is accused of contributing $20,000, which is more than the legal limit, to the Senate candidacy of his friend Wendy Long. The idea that the Obama administration has a zero tolerance policy towards campaign finance violations is absurd in the extreme. During Obama’s both 2008 and 2012 campaigns the Obama website, as John Hinderaker writes, was

deliberately designed (by disabling standard security protocols that are used by all other campaigns) to encourage illegal contributions by foreigners and donors who, like D’Souza, had already contributed the maximum allowable. No federal authority has made the slightest effort to investigate, let alone criminally prosecute, those obvious violations by the Obama campaign and an unknown number of its contributors.

And, on the subject of zero tolerance of electoral violations, how about enforcing the laws against voter fraud? Voter fraud has become an element of the Democrats’ election strategy, to the point where they react with hysteria whenever anyone tries to take steps to prevent illegal votes from being cast. If the U.S. Attorney is so concerned about honest elections, what has he, or any other law enforcement authority in New York State, done to enforce the laws relating to ballot integrity?

D'Souza's real crime is his achievement: the anti-Obama film 2016 he made is the second biggest-grossing political documentary of all time.

Femen's Violent, Anti-Christian Matriarchy Would Be Hell

Femen is a group of disgusting feminists whose main purpose seems to be aggression and ferocious attacks against Christianity and its symbols. They can't be offended for being called "disgusting" because disgust is what they constantly try to provoke in normal people.

I wonder how these men-haters would fare in non-Christian societies, like Muslim ones, for example.

Freedom of expression is for everything, of course: repugnant and meaningless displays of vulgarity as well as reasoned discourse, unworthy as well as valuable communications.

But at least we should recognise that some people use it in a mindless way, just to offend without a real objective.

And anyway, exhibitions of Femen's rotten anti-aesthetical sense in churches do violate the law, since they trespass on private property, as was the case of those "sex workers", as the politically-correct expression goes, of Pussy Riot in Russia.

Say what you like but I've signed on L'observatoire de la Christianophobie the French petition to call for the dissolution of the group Femen and the expulsion of its leader, written by the association Defensor Christi, which says:

Mr. Prime Minister,

the particularly odious profanation by a young woman member of the group Femen in the church of the Madeleine in Paris, on the morning of Friday, December 20, has rightly provoked the outrage of Christians and general disapproval of politicians Left and Right.

This new desecration, occurring after those in the Notre-Dame de Paris by the same group Femen, should be treated with the utmost rigour.

Therefore we demand from your government

1. immediate dissolution of the group Femen,

2. immediate revocation of the status of "refugee" that was granted on 9 April by OFPRA to Miss Inna Shevchenko, leader of said group Femen,

3. subsequent expulsion from our country of Miss Inna Shevchenko.

A photo of the Ukrainian Inna Shevchenko can be seen in the English newspaper The Independent, accompanying an article entitled "I don't want to be liked". That she's not after likeability is just lucky, given the aesthetic appeal of the picture in question, in which she is wearing only trousers, while her topless and misshapen torso shows the red writing "Christmas is canceled" and a policeman chases her outside Saint Peter's in the Vatican.

Read this description:

...have desecrated churches... The extremists spread feces on the walls of a Russian Orthodox Church, ordering the priest to remove all Christian symbols. ”And if we didn’t do it, they’d resort to force,” the frightened priest says.

The subject of the first sentence, which I have removed, is "Roving bands of jihadists and Salafists" in Tunisia at the time of the "Arab Spring". But it might very well have been feminist or homosexual activists.

The similarity goes even further: members of Femen call their campaigns “topless Jihad”.

Since the mainstream media will only tell you the small part of the truth that doesn't ruin Femen's image, let's turn to the website A Voice for Men for some facts, all duly documented and sourced:

[W]e have been seeing, here, in Europe, some gruesome acts of vandalism throughout the year 2012 from feminist organizations such as FEMEN and Pussy Riot.

So let’s talk a bit about these FEMEN criminals who, due to the pussy pass, have avoided the jail terms that would have undoubtedly be [sic] applied had it been men who were committing the same deeds they did...

Of course, the fact that they attempted to initiate violence with police [at the 2012 London Olympics] did not actually appear in any English language newspaper, thus the ‘poor little innocent women being victimized by police brutality’ could once again be used. If the protesters were to be naked men around an Olympics venue where there are children, nobody would have questioned the actions of the police forces and placing them on a sex offenders list would have been a foregone conclusion.

But all the aforementioned protests still seem rather innocent to a certain degree.

However, in July 2012, Yana Zhdanova, a FEMEN member, came to the airport when Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, was arriving in Ukraine and ran towards him screaming ‘Get out!’ whilst her naked back contained the following message: “Kill Kirill!"

Yes, it was in English and yes she actually assaulted the Russian Orthodox cleric...

In August, Inna Șevcenko took down, with chainsaw, a wooden cross in the center of Kiev that had been erected in the memory of the people that died during the Stalinist oppression. This took place in front of the former NKVD headquarters.

That’s right, [a] monument erected from private money donated by the survivors of a real oppression, was taken down by an almost-naked feminist, because she felt that the vandals from Pussy Riot had to be set free and thus she is entitled to walk freely with a chainsaw in the center of a European capital city and take down monuments.

700 people were killed in November 1941 in Kiev by Stalin’s regime. That’s only one month out of a long-time regime and only one city. All those people were killed for disliking the predecessor of feminist ideology – Marxism-Leninism. But those people cannot be commemorated properly because the FEMEN movement says so.

Just imagine someone taking down the Washington monument or the monument that’s been placed at ground zero after 9/11. That was the sentimental value of that monument for the Ukrainian people that suffered through real oppression.

The Ukrainian authorities wanted to arrest her but the FEMEN movement organized a blockade and Inna eventually fled Ukraine and moved to France where she opened a ‘training center for activists’ and she actually has the nerve to claim that she is being persecuted by the Ukrainian authorities.

And these violent thugs are being cried over on in the Ukrainian media because they got alienated by their families once they joined the movement. Would anyone from the media even care, let alone be compassionate, if they were men? Again, I sincerely doubt it.

Some might think that calling them ‘violent thugs’ is too much, albeit in my moral compass, someone who uses a chainsaw in the centre of a major city to take down a monument is indeed a violent thug. Allow me translate a statement of Inna Șevcenko in the last article cited above:

I try to shake women in Ukraine and make them socially active. We provoke them, show that women can do it. I generally aim to organize in 2017 a female revolution. Maybe not a matriarchy, but very close to it. Enough with the male sins! [Emphasis added]

Expel her from France, I say. I'm glad I've signed that petition.

Taqiyya Trials in Europe

First published on Raymond Ibrahim site.

By Enza Ferreri



The issue of taqiyya – the religious permission, indeed virtue, of Muslim deception to infidels for the good of Islam – is such a uniquely crucial aspect of the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims, especially, like in the West, when the former are a minority and the latter a majority, that there have been at least a couple of trials in Europe revolving around it, one recent and the other current.

In May 2013 there was a legal case in Italy in which a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Khalid Chaouki, a Moroccan Muslim immigrant to Italy and now MP, sued another Moroccan immigrant, Souad Sbai, a woman journalist and former Italian MP who had accused him of practicing taqiyya when he was saying that he had renounced the Brotherhood while in fact he still ’shared its goals and ideas of dangerous, extreme Islam’. He lost the case.

In Britain, in the last few days of 2013 Tim Burton, the Radio Officer of the newly-formed Liberty GB, an outspoken counterjihad, pro-Western and Christian civilisation party, got into trouble.

I have to declare an interest in the matter since I am the party’s Press Officer. Liberty GB has some similarities to Holland’s Freedom Party of Geert Wilders, although in no way, having started as recently as March 2013, it’s as yet so popular. We are running in the coming elections for the European Parliament in May.

Tim Burton has been charged by the Police with racially aggravated harassment for a few tweets and is soon due to appear in court.

At this point I must introduce the individual he tweeted about, a prominent albeit colourful Muslim whom Tim called ‘a mendacious grievance-mongering taqiyya-artist’ on Twitter. He is Fiyaz Mujhal, founder and director of Tell MAMA (Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks), an organisation that acts like a sort of helpline for the victims of ‘Islamophobia’ and in so doing monitors the entity of what it must consider a grave social problem.

If you are looking for a balanced assessment of the impact of Muslim crime, violence, stealth jihad and terrorism on British society you will not find it on Tell MAMA’s literature or website. But you’ll see plenty of examples of ‘hate’ towards Muslims, a great number of which in the form of films, books, political campaigns and, of course, ‘cyber harassment’, ‘cyber bullying’, ‘cyber abuse’, ‘cyber incitement’, ‘cyber threats’, ‘cyber stalking’, or ‘cyber hate’ – which is what got Tim in a legal jam.

Tell MAMA and the other organisation founded by Mr Mujhal, Faith Matters, had been successful in their demand that the UK Home Office ban Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer from entering the country.

The group has a Working Definition of Anti-Muslim Prejudice that includes ‘insults or attacks against Islam’, of which it’s safe to assume well-documented criticisms will be seen as examples. It is also good at crafting new expressions like ‘Anti-Muslim Cultural Racism’, which is Liberty GB’s sin in Tell MAMA’s eyes, as it describes us as ‘guilty of racialising Muslims’. How somebody can achieve such a feat is anyones’s guess.

In its ardour to chastise Liberty GB, Tell MAMA says something which goes beyond matters of opinion and is factually wrong: ’Halal slaughter and meat would also be banned (but no mention of kosher)’. We do object to kosher too and we say it clearly.

What prompted Tim Burton to label Mr Mujhal on Twitter “a mendacious grievance-mongering taqqiyya-artist” and “a lying Muslim scumbag” were some revelations appeared in The Daily Telegraph. In the wake of the beheading of British soldier Lee Rigby in a London street by two jihadists crying “Allahu Akbar” and giving the Quran as their motive in May of last year, Mr Mujhal in June reported

“a wave of attacks, harassment, and hate-filled speech against Muslims … an unprecedented number of incidents”, including “a rise in street harassment of Muslims – unprovoked, opportunistic attacks from strangers as Muslims go about their lives”.

He added: “Over the past week or so, these sorts of hate crimes have noticeably increased in number and, in many instances, become more extreme.

“The scale of the backlash is astounding … there has been a massive spike in anti-Muslim prejudice. A sense of endemic fear has gripped Muslim communities.”

The media, especially the BBC, have accepted the claims without question. A presenter on Radio 4’s influential Today programme stated that attacks on Muslims were now “on a very serious scale”.

Talk of a “massive anti-Muslim backlash” has become routine. And it is that figure issued by Tell Mama – of, to date, 212 “anti-Muslim incidents” since the Woolwich murder – which has formed the basis of nearly all this reporting.

But when journalist Andrew Gilligan investigated a bit further, it turned out that 57 per cent of the 212 reports referred to activity occurring just online, like postings on Twitter and Facebook, a further 16 per cent of the 212 reports had not been verified and not all the online abuse even originated in Britain.

Contrary to Tell MAMA’s claims of a climate of violence, only 17 of the 212 incidents, 8 per cent, involved the physical targeting of people and there were no attacks on anyone serious enough to require medical treatment.

The organisation has received a total of £375,000 from the UK government. But as a consequence of these revelations and even previous discoveries of discrepancies between its figures and police official figures – showing Tell MAMA’s inflated rates of and increase in anti-Muslim crimes – it had its public funding discontinued.

This hasn’t stopped its activity, though:

Mujhal asserted that tougher sentences were needed to tackle Islamophobic crime, noting that the guidelines by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to monitor social media were “not fit for purpose”.

“They raised the bar of prosecution significantly.

“Now unless there is a direct threat to somebody on Twitter or Facebook, the CPS will not prosecute. The CPS is just plainly out of sync with reality.

“We also need more robust sentencing. In one case, a pig’s head was left outside a mosque and the perpetrator came away with a community sentence.

Perhaps the lawsuit against Tim Burton is part of this campaign which seems apparently to target in particular social media.

Liberty GB is trying to make taqiyya the keystone of this trial. Given the special position of taqiyya in the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims, especially in non-Muslim-majority countries, if we, by making this case public, manage to make the British and Western people understand the meaning and nature of taqiyya, we will have managed to make them understand the whole nature of Islam in relation to us through it.

The Western public has been misled about Islam and believes that the ‘religion of peace’ is fundamentally similar to Christianity in its ethical outlook. Replace God with Allah, Jesus with Muhammad, and you still have the same moral commandments: love your enemies, be benevolent towards non-Muslims, and thou shall not lie or give false testimony. If the authority of a court can establish that taqiyya was indeed practised, Westerners can start to see that lying to them is not only allowed but encouraged by Islam as one of the means of submitting them to it, which is the final goal. As a consequence of this, people in the West may gradually become more and more reluctant to accept everything that Muslims say about Islam and may begin to doubt all the distortions they are currently fed.

One issue that we intend to bring to public attention is this: how can a Muslim’s swearing on the Quran in court be accepted as declaration of the truthfulness of his testimony when the very book he is swearing on gives him divine permission to lie?

Green Taxes Cause Energy Prices Hikes

No politician or mainstream media outlet is saying why shale gas from fracking may not reduce, as it should, consumers' utility bills.

The reason why energy bills in Britain are so high and will continue to soar is largely the ever-increasing cost of that “green energy” imposed to us by the Climate Change Act of 2008, pushed through Parliament by Ed Miliband, then Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, who recently proposed to halt price hikes made inevitable by his own policies.

Week after week we saw on the panel of Question Time, on BBC1, one or another Labour politician accusing the UK's "big six" (or seven) energy companies of increasing their bills and blaming the coalition government for letting them get away with it.

Nobody can say that the Labour Party is incapable of the most incredible hypocrisy. This is why UK electricity prices are so high:

Tony Blair's Labour government introduced in 2002 the Renewable Obligations Order. This system obliges companies supplying electricity to purchase an annually increasing proportion of their electricity from so-called green or renewable (non-fossil) sources. This means they have to pay inflated prices, which they pass on to their customers through their electricity bills.

Blair announced in May 2002 plans to meet Britain's Kyoto and EU targets, and in March 2003 the government published an Energy White Paper on the UK's future energy strategy. In its Section 4.7 it says explicitly:

We have introduced a Renewables Obligation for England and Wales in April 2002. This will incentivise generators to supply progressively higher levels of renewable energy over time. The cost is met through higher prices to consumers. By 2010, it is estimated that this support and Climate Change Levy (CCL) exemption will be worth around £1 billion a year to the UK renewables industry. [Emphases added]

The same White Paper estimated that meeting the carbon reduction targets would increase household energy bills by up to 15%.

The reason for this is that the renewables are very expensive, and in particular the offshore wind farms on which both the previous and this government are so keen are the most costly of all fuel sources.

As investigative journalist Christopher Booker righty says:

Politicians are complaining about rises in fuel bills that are largely the result of their own actions.

If you exaggeratedly tax companies in the pursuit of a "green energy" policy that follows the diktats of a discredited, if not outright refuted, theory like AGW (anthropogenic global warming), the inevitable result is higher prices for households and, in extreme cases, fuel poverty.

The coalition government is not much better than its socialist predecessor.

A few months ago SSE, one of the UK's six biggest energy companies, increased its prices by a further 8 per cent, and tried to explain that what made that price hike inevitable was the 13 per cent rise in the company's costs, two-thirds of which were due to “green” taxes and the soaring cost of connecting new wind farms to the grid.

While SSE called for a curb on these green levies – such as the crazy “carbon tax”, designed eventually to double the cost of electricity from fossil fuels, which still supply 70 per cent of our needs – the only official response was a fatuous call from our energy minister, Michael Fallon, for consumers to boycott SSE. Mr Fallon was oblivious to the fact that his Government’s policies will soon force all other energy companies to follow suit.

In the meantime, a new brand of criminals have emerged: the "energy thieves", utility clients who tamper with meters to steal their gas and electricity and in the process put the lives of neighbours at risk. Refusing to pay also means that their costs are passed on to honest customers.

This is exactly the scenario described by Milton Friedman as incentives for immoral behaviour brought about by bad laws, of which our Climate Change Act is a perfect example.

Photo of the Romney Marsh Wind Farm, on the Kent/East Sussex border, in England, courtesy of the website Britain Gallery

Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller Are still Fighting Back against Their Ban: Help Them



The 25 June 2013 is a significant date not only in the history of the counterjihad movement but also in the history of freedom of speech in one of the countries that most contributed to its establishment: Britain.

That is the date on the letter to Robert Spencer announcing the UK Home Secretary Theresa May's decision that he should

be excluded from the United Kingdom on the grounds that your presence here is not conducive to the public good...

The Home Secretary notes that you are the founder of the blog Jihad Watch (a site widely criticized for being Islamophobic). You co-founded the Freedom Defense Initiative and Stop Islamization of America, both of which have been described as anti-Muslim hate groups.

So those were the reasons given for Spencer's and fellow founder of American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) and SIOA Pamela Geller's ban.

As Robert Spencer put it at the time:

Muhammad al-Arifi, who has advocated Jew-hatred, wife-beating, and jihad violence, entered the U.K. recently with no difficulty. In not allowing us into the country solely because of our true and accurate statements about Islam, the British government is behaving like a de facto Islamic state. The nation that gave the world the Magna Carta is dead.

Al-Arifi is just one of the many Islamists admitted to Britain, in this case just a few days before Spencer's ban. The interesting thing about him is that he's the author of these words:

Devotion to jihad for the sake of Allah, and the desire to shed blood, to smash skulls, and to sever limbs for the sake of Allah and in defense of His religion, is, undoubtedly, an honor for the believer. Allah said that if a man fights the infidels, the infidels will be unable to prepare to fight.

Robert Spencer, according to the Home Office, instead wrote this:

...it [Islam] is a religion and is a belief system that mandates warfare against unbelievers for the purpose for establishing a societal model that is absolutely incompatible with Western society because media and general government unwillingness to face the sources of Islamic terrorism these things remain largely unknown.

The grammatically and logically confused quotation is unlikely to be literal, as anyone who's read Robert's prose will easily realize. Nevertheless, what distinguishes the latter extract from the one immediately above? They both equate Islam with war against infidels, but one - Al-Arifi's - approvingly, and the other - Spencer's - disapprovingly:

[I]t is perfectly acceptable to speak about jihad violence in the UK, as long as you’re for it. If you oppose it, watch out...

This is even more true in view of the fact that the purpose of the two anti-jihad campaigners' visit to Britain was to lay a wreath at a memorial for British soldier Lee Rigby - murdered by two jihadists on a London street on 22 May - on Armed Forces Day, 29 June.

Immediately after the ban, The British Society For Freedom of Speech published the online petition Allow Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer to Speak in UK, which has so far collected almost 10,000 signatures, including mine.

On 2nd July, Spencer and Geller fought back with an appeal against their ban and instructed lawyers in the UK.

A couple of weeks ago, two judges decided to uphold the Government’s exclusion on Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller from the UK.

But that's not the end of it. A fund has been established to help the lawsuit against the entry ban.

They know that it’s not going to be easy:

The entire British government and media elite is determined to appease Islamic supremacists and discredit and silence the defenders of freedom. We will have to hire a top British legal team that can navigate through all the roadblocks and obstacles that the Home Office puts up.

It’s going to cost us upwards of $25,000.

So, please help them fight the ban: donate via Paypal to americanfreedomdefense@aol.com .

Nazis Ordered: Remove All Christian Crosses and Spread Paganism

I've shown in the first and second articles of this series - concluding with the present article - that Hitler was neopagan and anti-Christian and that the new pagan religions that developed in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s gave Nazism part of its ideological foundations.

It is only to be expected, then, that the Hitler regime tried to tear German society away from Christianity and return it to pagan beliefs. While Hitler made public proclamations that he would protect Christianity in order to be acceptable to the German people who were in their majority Christian, his recorded private statements and his actions tell a very different story.

Many absurd, unbelievable claims about Hitler's presumed Christianity have been made and, in this day and age when anything about Christianity, even the most preposterous assertion, as long as it's bad of course, is accepted as undisputable fact, Michael Coren has produced an excellent book, relatively short and easy to read, which I recommend to everybody who is interested in the truth. It is Heresy: Ten Lies They Spread About Christianity (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) . In it he says:

In January 1942, the New York Times, certainly not now and not really even then a particular friend of Christianity, published a thirty-point program listing the central dogmas of the National Reich Church, a body established by the Nazis to replace Christianity and to eliminate Christian ideas from the next generation of young Germans. It's significant that the Times published this, because if such an internationally important newspaper was aware of Nazism's hatred of Christianity, we can be sure it was a known and accepted fact elsewhere.

This is the final statement of the program of dogmas:

On the day of the foundation of the National Reich Church the Christian cross shall be removed from all churches, cathedrals, and chapels inside the frontiers of the Reich and its colonies and will be replaced by the symbol of invincible Germany - the swastika.

And this is from another source that, like the NYT, can be accused of anything but conservative, pro-Christian bias, Wikipedia:

In power, the Hitler regime conducted a protracted Struggle with the Churches. Hitler moved to eliminate political Catholicism, while agreeing a Reich concordat with the Holy See which promised autonomy for the Catholic Church in Germany. Hitler then routinely violated the treaty, moved to close all Catholic organisations that weren't strictly religious, and permitted a persecution of the Catholic Church... He angered the churches by appointing the neo-pagan Alfred Rosenberg as official Nazi ideologist, and generally permitted or encouraged anti-church radicals such as Himmler, Goebbels and Bormann to conduct their persecutions of the churches.

Hitler was a Social Darwinist, and as such he believed that the universe is governed by the struggle between weak and strong, ideas that ran counter to Christianity, then prevailing in Germany.

The Nazis promoted paganism before and especially after coming to power in 1933.

Soon after coming to power they replaced Christian holidays and festivals with pagan ones such as "The Day of the Summer Solstice" and "The Day of the Winter Solstice". Wedding ceremonies were celebrated according to neo-pagan rites:

"After the bridal couple's exchange of rings, the votive warden pronounces the blessing: Mother Earth, which lovingly bears us all, and Father Sky, who blesses us with his light and his weather, and all the beneficent powers of the air, may they rule over you until your destiny is fulfilled." [Once again, we see the evidence of the pagan: the Co-Rulership of the god and goddess are recognized, and once again, the creature is worshipped rather than the Creator.]

Crucifixes were gradually removed from hospitals and schools. Just as it's happening in our days.

Schools were massively targeted as part of a strategy to deChristianize the young. In 1935, Christian prayers in schools were stopped, and from 1941 onwards all lessons concerning Christianity were banned for all students over 14. Schoolchildren were taught what the Nazis called the "glorious pre-Christian German history".

The Nazi Teachers Association actively discouraged its members from taking religious education, and many teachers of religious studies (who were all required to be licensed by the state) inculcated neo-paganism into their pupils. Later on, teachers were explicitly and totally forbidden to attend voluntary religion classes organized by the Catholic Church.

The Nazis even used former Christian religious facilities, seized by the government, as schools where students were trained in male supremacist ideology, through the works of homosexual theorists like Otto Weininger.

Rites and ceremonies from Germany's pagan past were held all over the country. All Nazi meetings and rallies, under the shadow of flaming torches and where slogans full of hate and violence were shouted, were following pagan ceremonies undistinguishable from those held thousands of years before at pagan temples and altars.

The Nazis also used art to re-awaken paganism, using ancient Greek concepts and symbols and imitating Greek statues, showing strong men and women of the Aryan race. Hitler admired the Spartan model and dreamed of a superior race created by eugenics.

Laurence Rees, the contemporary British historian who wrote, directed and produced many BBC series and documentaries on the Second World War and in particular on Nazism, in his book (also on DVD) The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) described the thrust of Hitler's semi-autobiographical work Mein Kampf (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) as "bleak nihilism" revealing a cold universe with no moral structure other than the fight between different people for supremacy:

What's missing from Mein Kampf, and this is a fact that has not received the acknowledgement it should—is any emphasis on Christianity.

And this despite the fact that Germany, Rees noted, had been Christian for a thousand years. So, he concluded:

The most coherent reading of Mein Kampf is that whilst Hitler was prepared to believe in an initial creator God, he did not accept the conventional Christian vision of heaven and hell, nor the survival of an individual "soul"... we are animals and just like animals we face the choice of destroying or being destroyed.

Hitler believed much more in, and was much more influenced by, Charles Darwin than Jesus Christ.

It's not entirely surprising that today, like in Hitler's day, we witness a return to paganism in conjunction to a return to strong nationalist sentiments. We should be wary of nationalism, which is not bad per se at all, in fact can be a positive force, but taken to extremes can become very irrational and dangerous, as indeed Hitler's example illustrates.

The danger of a return to values and ideas espoused by the Nazis is real, but doesn’t come so much from the direction of the usual suspects, “Islamophobic”, neo-Nazi groups, as from a much more mainstream, Leftist direction. The threat has two sources: one is the rise of Islam in the West – aided and abetted by the Left - with its well-known ideological and historical links to Nazism and anti-Semitism. The second source is less well-known. Recent historical, in-depth and ground-breaking research, thanks to the opening of national archives - previously closed to the public - after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, has thrown an entirely new light on what nurtured Nazi ideology. We already knew that Hitler and Nazism were neo-pagan and anti-Christian (despite what the Left says), but books like Karla Poewe's New Religions and the Nazis (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK), Gene Edward Veith's Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judaeo-Christian Worldview (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) and others go much further than that.

Regarding Poewe's work, which took 10 years of painstaking historical research, I can only agree with this review:

Inevitably claims that deny that Nazism was rooted in Christianity draw fire. As a scholar in modern and early modern Europe at the University of Victoria, I affirm this book as extremely well researched. The onus is on those who would disprove its assertions to do more thorough research--a daunting challenge indeed. The Nazis were as hostile to Christianity as to Judaism. The preparation for the ascendency of National Socialism provided by the advocates of new religions like Jacob Wilhelm Hauer is a sobering reality that needs to be understood more widely today.

It's an eerie feeling to recognise that Nazis, as I showed in the previous two article of this series, shared our days’ most cherished and growing ideas, from the normalisation of homosexuality to the decadence of the family, from the rise and destigmatisation of illegitimacy to the pantheism and anti-human feelings of environmentalism.


Photo by Marion Doss (Creative Commons CC BY-SA 2.0).

The New Pagan Religions that Built Nazism

This is the second article of a series of three.

There are many variations within neopaganism, deriving from the fact that it collects a large number of geographically diverse faiths with some common threads, but all neopagans agree on one crucial point: Christianity must be, if it is not already, defeated.

As showed in the first article of this series, Hitler's Neopaganism and Anti-Christianity, and in anthropologist and historian Karla Poewe's book New Religions and the Nazis (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , being neopagan in the 1920s and 1930s was deeply linked to opposition to the Jewish-Christian tradition.

The book reveals a major, so far neglected, element of Nazi history: the contribution of the so-called new religions, defined as non-established religions, to the emergence of Nazi ideology in the twenties and thirties in Germany.

This book is not to be overlooked or underestimated because it's the result of a 10-year ground-breaking research in the German Federal Archives in Berlin and Koblenz. It was researched from original documents, letters and unpublished papers, including the SS personnel files held in the German Federal Archives.

The fall of the Berlin Wall gave Poewe, New Religions and the Nazis' author, access to the archives of the Berlin Mission Society. In 1995, while working in these archives, she discovered a great amount of material regarding conflicts between members of the Berlin Mission, a Christian missionary society, and the Nazis.

Karla Poewe is Professor Emeritus in Anthropology at the University of Calgary, in Canada, and Adjunct Research Professor at Liverpool Hope University, in England. She was interviewed by the Calgary Herald after her book came out:

"The new religions that developed in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s ushered in National Socialism and nurtured it," Poewe said.

"There were constant battles in the 1920s between Christians and the members of these new religions, because they identified Christianity as a kind of Jewish imperialism. They wanted nothing to do with it, so they came up with their own version. They tried to build a genuine German religion."

Because the Nazis were "on the far right," as a nationalist movement, they tend to be misinterpreted as a more extreme version of Christian conservatism. But "they weren't trying to conserve anything," Poewe said. They were rather extreme radicals, trying to overthrow completely the 1,000-year tradition of German Christianity -- replacing the cross with the swastika.

"There's a big mistake in identifying National Socialism as a Christian movement," Poewe said.

"There was a Deutsche Christen movement, but they weren't Christian at all. They rejected the Old Testament, Jesus had to be an Aryan, they were hostile to St. Paul, and they emphasized (the Gospel of) St. Mark. They remained in the church, but rejected everything Christian like the Trinity. Christ was at best a good philosopher." [Emphases added]

Poewe researched the former German missionary Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, who in the 1920s founded the German Faith Movement (Deutsche Glaubensbewegung or DGB), mixing Nordic and Hindu religions with Germanic idealistic philosophy. This new religion was intended to express the essence of National Socialism and the New German Man, as found in the the SS.

We have to consider the state of major turmoil into which the First World War threw Germany. The loss of the war and and the punitive, draconian conditions of the Treaty of Versailles imposed on Germany produced general discontent and resentment. Therefore Germans, and in particular intellectuals, took political, ideological and religious matters into their hands with the purpose of achieving national regeneration.

By fusing politics, religion, theology, Indo-Aryan metaphysics and Darwinian theory they intended to create a new, genuinely German, pagan-faith-based political movement: that was National Socialism.

Hauer, founder of the DGB,

is particularly interesting, Poewe said, because he sought the pagan roots of German religion in Hinduism. In pre-history, the Aryans who invaded northern India were the same race as those who later became Germans. And Hauer found the warrior universe of the Bhagavad Gita particularly inspiring -- "it fed him the kind of moral relativism he sought," Poewe said.

"The rejection of Christianity was due to the fact that it is universal, and they wanted something local" -- the Volkisch (folk) phenomenon. "They rejected the universalist. They wanted something with a historical-genetic-racial link to them," Poewe said.

"They also rejected Christian morality. They couldn't stand the Ten Commandments. They were totally against any categorical or timeless morality. They wanted something opportunistic, something that changed with the human circumstances." [Emphasis added]

Sounds familiar. Where have I heard this before? There are no moral absolutes, anything goes, we just want to be happy, we indeed have a right to be happy: that's all there is to ethics. It sounds very, very modern. It's today's prevailing ethos, complete with the jettisoning of Christianity.

Add to that our own revival of eugenics, wide use of science in reproduction and epidemic of abortions, and Nazism looks more and more like a pioneering movement.

And Christian universalism, mentioned in the quotation, is indeed a profound antidote to racism, now as in Hitler's time.

Unsurprisingly, Poewe observed that former Nazis were prominent in the German New Age movement of the 1970s.

The Nazi movement "took elements from the Christian religion, but it didn't mean they were Christian. They also took things from Hinduism, from Buddhism -- Tibetan Buddhism was particularly popular among the SS. From this they concocted a mythology that gave them a picture of the world that appealed to them. They wrote about it, novels, plays, poetry. It was very political, in some ways pantheistic."

And here's another element of great modernity in Nazism:

Hauer's DGB bunde shared with National Socialism a tendency toward homoerotism. Hauer himself was permissibly heterosexual, but "homosexuality was very tolerated in these youth movements, and a high percentage of the SA and SS were homosexual or bisexual. People like to think that because Adolf Hitler murdered (SA leader) Ernst Rohm, who was homosexual, he was repressive of homosexuality. But that wasn't the case. It's a myth to think the Nazi movement was against homosexuality. Far from it; it wasn't sexually repressive at all," Poewe said. [Emphasis added]

It all fits nicely.

Third part tomorrow.


About the photo: it is a visual demonstration of the links between paganism and Nazism, as described in Nicholas Clarke's book Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) .