Wednesday, May 15, 2013



The Church of Scotland pisses on the Bible

Their antisemitism trumps all else

Earlier this month, the Church of Scotland issued a report titled "The Inheritance of Abraham? A Report on the 'Promised Land.'"

The essence of the report is that according to the Bible, Jews have no more attachment to the land of Israel than anyone else. Hence "promised land" is in quotation marks in the report's title -- because there is no promised land.

In the report's words: "The New Testament contains a radical re-interpretation of the concepts of 'Israel,' 'temple,' 'Jerusalem' and 'land.' When the Bible mentions 'Israel,' it does not mean Israel; when it says 'temple,' the Bible does not mean the Jewish temple; 'Jerusalem' does not mean the city of Jerusalem; and 'land' does not mean land. 

"Promises about the land of Israel," the report continues, "were never intended to be taken literally, or as applying to a defined geographical territory."

Even during the worst excesses of Christian anti-Semitism in the Middle Ages, it is doubtful that any normative Christian body declared that "Israel," "the temple," "Jerusalem" and "the land" no longer meant or were ever intended to mean what those words represent.

This claim is not only profoundly anti-Semitic. It is an act of theological forgery; it makes a mockery of the Bible as a coherent document and it renders Christianity inherently anti-Semitic.

It would be as if a major post-Christian religious body had announced that "Jesus," "Christ," "crucifixion" and "resurrection" had never meant what Christians and the New Testament had always understood them to mean. Imagine if a major Muslim body declared that Jesus means Muhammad; Christ means Quran; crucifixion means Islamophobia; and resurrection means the Hajj.

I have never equated criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. But the Church of Scotland report is not about criticism of Israel; it is about invalidating the Jewish people and invalidating the Jews' historically incontestable claims to the land upon which the only independent states that ever existed were Jewish.

--The Church of Scotland report asserts that the Bible does not support the existence of a Jewish state: "There has been a widespread assumption by many Christians as well as many Jewish people that the Bible supports an essentially Jewish state of Israel. This raises an increasing number of difficulties. ... "

--It asserts that justice and the existence of a Jewish state are mutually exclusive: "There is a direct conflict of interest between wanting human rights and justice for all and retaining the right to the land."

--It asserts that the Jews' return to Israel has no biblical basis.

--It asserts that the notion that the Jews have or ever had a special relationship with God -- one of the most oft repeated ideas in the Hebrew Bible -- is negated in that very same Bible: "That exclusivist tradition implied Jews had a special, privileged position in relation to God. But the prophetic tradition stood against this." The Chosen People is not chosen, in other words.

--It asserts that God's promise of the land to Abraham has nothing to do with the Jews; it is only about Jesus: "The promise to Abraham about land is fulfilled through the impact of Jesus, not by restoration of land to the Jewish people."

--It asserts that even Jesus -- that proud, religious Jew -- did not believe in any special relationship between God and the Jews: "Jesus offered a radical critique of Jewish specialness ... "

At the same time, this truly immoral document does not devote a word to why there were Palestinian refugees: While the Jews accepted the 1947-48 partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, all the neighboring Arab states rejected the partition and invaded the Jews in order to annihilate Israel at birth.

Nor does the report devote a single sentence to how Israel's occupation of the West Bank came about: In 1967, Israel's neighbors sought to exterminate Israel just as Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and most Palestinians and other Muslims in the Middle East today wish to now. And that only because of that war, won by Israel, did Israel come to occupy the West Bank of Jordan.

Nor is a word devoted to Palestinian national honoring of their numerous terrorists, or to the exterminationist and anti-Semitic propaganda that saturates Middle East media or to the widespread Palestinian support for terrorism (according to the just-released Pew Forum poll of Muslims, 40 percent of Palestinians support suicide terror).

And the Church of Scotland did not think it important to even hint at what happened in Gaza after the Israelis gave the whole of Gaza to the Palestinians: The Palestinians converted it into a terror-state that regularly launches rockets into Israel to kill as many Israelis as possible.

And, most vile of all, the Church of Scotland never once notes, let alone condemns, the Muslim countries and organizations that seek to annihilate Israel, an existential threat that no other country or people in the world face.

The Church of Scotland has given voice to the ugliest depiction of Jews since medieval times. The official reaction of the Scottish Jewish community is that Christian-Jewish post-Holocaust dialogue seems to have been a moral and intellectual waste of time. I do not agree. But if other Christian churches do not condemn the Church of Scotland -- despite its promise to revise its report to include a statement that Israel has a right to exist (!) -- even pro-Christian Jews will wonder whether the Scottish Jewish community's reaction is valid.

And how did this happen? The report is a combination of medieval Christian anti-Judaism and contemporary leftist anti-Zionism. For Jews and Israel, that's a lethal combination.

SOURCE






London Police give out cautions for a quarter of ALL crimes including rapes, drug trafficking and robbery

One in four of the crimes ‘solved’ by Britain’s largest police force last year involved the offender accepting a ‘slap on the wrist’, it emerged last night.

Nearly 30,000 cautions were handed to criminals in London for offences including robbery, drug smuggling and even rape.

They made up a quarter of the 118,000 crimes counted as solved by police in the capital during those 12 months.

Critics said the public and police are being short-changed by a rampant ‘cautions culture’ which lets off serious criminals.

The figures, revealed by a Freedom of Information request, showed the Metropolitan Police issued 28,998 cautions and youth warnings last year.

Among the cautions were 5,843 for violent attacks, 165 for sexual offences and, astonishingly, five for rape.  A total of 180 offenders were cautioned for grievous bodily harm or wounding, 131 for robbery and 318 for drug trafficking.

Police handed out 205,700 cautions nationwide in the 12 months ending in September 2012, according to the Ministry of Justice.

Among them were 40,148 for drug offences, 13,466 for violent assaults, 2,726 for burglary and 1,422 for sex attacks.

The figures represented a 12 per cent decrease compared with the previous 12 months, and a 44 per cent fall from 2007 when cautions peaked at 367,300.

Last month, Policing Minister Damian Green announced a review of guidelines for issuing police cautions as part of a wider crackdown. Mr Green said the Government’s goal was to see the use of cautions restricted to ensure serious criminals would never escape punishment.

The review, due to report next month, will examine whether cautions should  be banned for some offences. There  are fears that victims of violent and even sexual crimes are subject to a postcode lottery where attackers in some areas  are more than twice as likely to escape with a caution.

Ministers are also concerned at the way repeat offenders receive cautions for multiple crimes.

Tony Arbour, a Tory politician in London who uncovered the data, said justice was not being done and those who receive cautions ‘escape punishment’.

A Met spokesman said the force follows national guidance and cautions are issued only in the case of serious offences after discussions with prosecutors.

He said the force ‘supports’ the use of cautions, which are mostly used to deal with first-time offenders.

He added: ‘A caution is a serious matter, which can have significant consequences for the person’s future employment.’

SOURCE






Fanatical fools trying to blow us all up? They're the least of our problems...

By Peter Hitchens

Long ago I annoyed a prominent Irish republican. When we were mistakenly left alone together in the same hospitality room in a TV studio, he raged at me, white with fury, accusing me of being paid to persecute him.

It crossed my mind that I might be a terrorist target as a result. I pondered for a while, and concluded there wasn't much I could do about it.

Too bad. My father had spent long months on the Russian convoys in the Second World War, harried by appalling weather, U-boats, German surface raiders and the Luftwaffe, with half an inch of steel between him and a sea so cold that it would kill you in seconds.

Compared to that, my danger was tiny and barely worth worrying about. My only sorrow was that my minor risk was all in vain. Not long afterwards, the British State cravenly surrendered to the Provisional IRA, and called it 'peace'.

This has made me more scornful, ever after, of the ludicrous spasms we go into when criminal bombers strike at us. In the end these people are just immoral zealots who have turned to crime because they have an exaggerated idea of their own goodness.

In many cases they save us the trouble of killing them by doing it themselves. But if they survive, they deserve a fair trial and then a swift vertical journey through a trap door with a rope round their necks.

Yet instead, we do exactly what they hope we will do. We act as if they are important. We turn our countries upside down to take useless precautions against them. We give the police special powers. We make travel into a silly palaver of searches and checks of obviously harmless people. We destroy half our ancient liberties as we tramp and stamp about. Then, later on, we give in to the terrorists anyway.

None of these precautions works. They are as futile as the toy golf-ball detector which a cunning fraud successfully sold as an explosives scanner, and they work on the same principle. The client is so scared that he has stopped thinking, and will gullibly accept almost anything he is told.

If some fanatical cretin wants to bomb a marathon, how on earth can you stop him? We know that the American authorities had been warned about this particular cretin, but, short of locking him up without charge, what could they realistically have done?

'Our culture is already noticeably scared of Islam and gives it a great deal of leeway. My own view is that this will end in the slow Islamisation of this country'

Just before the July 7 outrages in London in 2005, our vaunted, boastful security organs were completely unaware that anything was going to happen (and, worse, our emergency services were sadly unprepared).

They have been trying to justify their enormous budgets ever since by rounding up groups of bearded, incompetent but talkative fantasists, and slinging them into prison for very long periods. They also periodically let it be known that they have saved us from lots of other nameless perils that they can't speak about. Well, perhaps.

Meanwhile we continue the hilarious pursuit of some furry-faced Muslim cleric, who seems to have been invented to demonstrate that we no longer control our own borders. The Government's legal bill must be enormous. What we won't even consider doing is leaving the EU and the Human Rights convention, the two actions that would free us to act as we wish.

Meanwhile, the real Islamic problem grows unnoticed – the quiet spread of Sharia law, female subjugation and polygamy in our country, mainly the result of the uncontrolled mass immigration that would have been a good deal easier to tackle than 'terrorism' ever was.

In the end, who knows where this may lead? Our culture is already noticeably scared of Islam and gives it a great deal of leeway. My own view is that this will end in the slow Islamisation of this country.

If you don't think we will wear this, look at the fascinating picture of Katherine Russell, widow of the unlamented Boston murderer Tamerlan Tsarnaev, an all-American girl, brought up in freedom, yet now shrouded in the submissive garb of the Muslim wife. I shouldn't think she thought that would happen to her, either. She is a metaphor for all of us.

SOURCE




Report details lives ruined for children put on sex-offender registries

Put on a sex registry for the offense of public nudity as a minor. Harassed by neighbors out of a home and banned from a homeless shelter because of an offense committed at age 15.

The New York-based research group Human Rights Watch issued an extensive report today on the life-shattering consequences of putting minors on sex registries for offenses — sometimes shockingly mild offenses — for the rest of their lives.

Filled with devastating stories of teens and young adults unable to put offenses behind them, the rights group's report is called “Raised on the Register: The Irreparable Harm of Placing Children on Sex Offender Registries in the U.S.”

The report is the product of a 16-month investigation into 581 cases and interviews with 281 sex offenders — median age 15 — in 20 states.  Prosecutors, defense attorneys, child sexuality experts and victims of “child on child” sexual assault were also interviewed.  The investigation explores how a burgeoning national web of laws in various states requiring constant registration and public disclosure of offenders’ identities has affected the lives of young offenders long after time served or rehabilitation. Some on registries have killed themselves, even before reaching adulthood.

The report begins with Jacob C., who was 11 years old when convicted of one count of sexual misconduct in Michigan for touching, not penetrating, his sister’s genitals. He was not allowed to live in a home with other children, was eventually put into foster care and was placed on a sex registry that was made public when he turned 18.  He struggled to graduate from high school, and was shunned because of his registration status. And when he enrolled in college, he said, campus police followed him everywhere. He dropped out.

Now 26, the report says, Jacob’s life continues to be defined and limited by a conviction at age 11.

Another case in the report: “In 2004, in Western Pennsylvania, a 15-year-old girl was charged with manufacturing and disseminating child pornography for having taken nude photos of herself and (posting) them on the internet. She was charged as an adult, and as of 2012 was facing registration for life.”

Sex offender laws, the report says, “that trigger registration requirements for children began proliferating in the United States during the late 1980s and early 1990s. They subject youth offenders to registration for crimes ranging from public nudity and touching another child’s genitalia over clothing to very serious violent crimes like rape.”

Registries can also include “people who have committed offenses like public urination, indecent exposure (such as streaking across a college campus), and other more relatively innocuous offenses.”

The Human Rights Watch report acknowledged that registration laws were designed to protect the public from offenders, and that they are based on assumptions that offenders are likely to violate again.

“But including youth sex offenders on registries assumes that they are highly likely to reoffend, which is not the case,” the report says. “Numerous studies estimate the recidivism rate among children who commit sexual offenses to between 4 and 10 percent, compared with a 13 percent rate for adult sex offenders and a national rate of 45 percent for all crimes.”

The report was prepared by Nicole Pittman, a national expert on the application of sex offender registration laws who was an attorney at the Defender Association of Philadelphia. She specialized in child sexual assault cases and registries, and has provided testimony to Congress and state legislatures on the subject.

The report calls current registry laws “an overbroad policy of questionable effectiveness” that leaves the public often unable to discern who on a registry is actually dangerous.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICSDISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL  and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine).   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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