This happened a few days ago in Indonesia, but I haven’t blogged about it. From Doug Ireland’s report for New York-based Gay City News:

“The mob invaded the lobby of the hotel [named the Oval] and would not leave unless the police and the hotel management would guarantee that our conference would not go forward,” Sabbadini told Gay City News.

“The rule of law was basically suspended during the occupation by the Islamists, and both the police and the hotel management gave in completely to the demands of the mob’s leaders, who threatened to call in reinforcements if their demands were not met,” he added. “The hotel management even went so far as to give a complete list of the conference participants staying in the hotel to the mob.

“Later that evening, mob members conducted a floor-by-floor sweep of the hotel, going to the rooms of conference participants to make sure they had left.”

As a hoax on April Fool’s Day, Swedish libertarian Mattias Svensson blogged about his “coming out” as a religious man. He is very far from religious, although his treatment of Ayn Rand’s novels resembles religious devotion. Well, his sudden religious awakening was intended as a joke, but perhaps he should read what libertarian academic Walter Block says about Ayn Rand’s “belligerent atheism”:

I reject religion, all religion, since, as an atheist, I am unconvinced of the existence of God. Indeed, I go further. I am no agnostic: I am convinced of His non-existence. However, as a political animal, I warmly embrace this institution. It is a bulwark against totalitarianism. He who wishes to oppose statist depredations cannot do so without the support of religion. Opposition to religion, even if based on intellectual grounds and not intended as a political statement, nevertheless amounts to de facto support of government. […] It is time, it is long past time, that the Austro-libertarian movement reject the virulent Randian opposition to religion. Yes, Ayn Rand has made contributions to our efforts. We must not throw out the baby with the bathwater. But, surely, anti-religious sentiment belongs in the latter category, not the former.

Personally, I have had a very complicated relationship with religion. On the one hand, I reject much of the supernatural claims; but on the other hand, I do find moral comfort in the Torah and social comfort in the religious civilisation of which I am a member. To me, religion is a humanism of sorts—created by people in an attempt to understand and justify morality and society.

Of course, it’s not a mistake. The Catholic Church deliberately tries to blame gay people for the hundred of thousands of child abuses conducted by its clergy. This is what the Vatican and the rest of the church have done every time a paedophile priest is caught.

I think Andrew Sullivan is on to something:

Ask yourself: how many openly gay and adjusted priests have been found to have abused minors? Or ask yourself another question: if straight men were forbidden to marry women, had their sexual and emotional development truncated at the age of 13, and were forced into institutions where they were treated by teenage girls as gods, an given untrammeled private access to them, how much sexual abuse do you think would occur there? Please. This is not that hard to understand.

I think it’s compounded by the shame gay bishops feel about their own sexual orientation. They […] secretly associate their homosexuality with dysfunction, disorder, chaos, evil. So when they come across a fellow priest found to have molested teenage boys or children, they associate it with homosexuality—not pederasty—associate themselves with it, and try to cover it up—partly because they want to protect the church (which is their sole refuge) and partly because they want to protect those they wrongly associate with themselves.

He concludes:

I don’t believe, in other words, that you can tackle this problem without seeing it as a symptom of a much deeper failure of the church to come to terms with sexuality, sexual orientation and the warping, psychologically distorting impact of compulsory celibacy in the priesthood. If women and married men were allowed to be priests, if homosexuality were regarded in Catholic theology as a healthy and rare difference rather than as a shameful disorder, this atmosphere would end, and these crimes would for the most part disappear and the cloying, closeted power-structure which enabled them to go unpunished for so long would finally crumble.

Amen.

In a service on Friday, Raniero Cantalamessa, a top Vatican priest, talked about the “violent and concentric attacks” the Catholic Church had suffered after criticism for its failure to act when thousands of children in the church’s care were systematically raped. “The use of stereotypes and the passing from personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt remind me of the more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism,” he said.

Say what?!

The Vatican did nothing to protect the thousands of children who were raped in its institutions. For this the church is criticised. To compare this to the slaughter of millions of innocent Jews is truly grotesque.

“The time has come to do away with the Chief Rabbinate. This is the only conclusion any clear-headed observer, concerned about the way Judaism is being represented in the public domain, can draw,” a Jerusalem Post leader read on 28 March. “It has become nothing more than a source of jobs for haredi [ultra-Orthodox] rabbis alienated from the taxpayers paying their salaries.”

I second that. It is ridiculous that a mistake of early Zionism still holds Judaism in its grip. There are now three vibrant movements within Judaism, all of which are legitimate to millions of Jews. But in Israel, an increasingly dogmatic group of ultra-Orthodox rabbis have taken upon themselves to define who is a Jew and what religious practice is halachically correct. A good way to end the tedious debate over the legitimacy of conversions and rabbi ordinations would be to separate all religious institutions from the State of Israel. The secular state needs to make its own definition of who and what is Jewish and not let these issues be dictated by one religious group.

Apparently, a minor gay-related scandal is unfolding in Britain. The Conservative shadow home secretary, Chris Grayling, had been caught on tape suggesting that people who run bed and breakfasts in their homes should have the right to turn away gay couples. Some gay-rights activists are upset. Well, I think Mr Grayling is right. No one is ever entitled to enter a privately owned home. The B&B-owners that deny gay people a stay are homophobic bigots, but being a homophobic bigot is not a crime in itself.

I find many anti-discrimination laws problematic because they interfere with people’s liberty to do what they want with their property. In my opinion, legislators should only be concerned with discrimination when the state is concerned. Government authorities ought to treat all citizens equal, but citizens are entitled to decide for themselves how to treat each other. That is why it upsets me more when the police or the military discriminate gay people.

I also hold that we all should do more to criticise people who discriminate. Homophobes, anti-Semites, Islamophobes, racists, and sexists have no place in a modern society. They should be told this and asked to better themselves. But the law should not force them.

Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker takes a spin on something a bigot wrote about Barack Obama being the first gay president. I would welcome Jefferson into the family. He is so neat, witty, and literate.

In a small Swedish town, a 23-year-old man has beaten a 78-year-old woman to death. People are understandably upset by the incident, and many locals have taken to the streets to demonstrate their opposition to violence. Meanwhile, Sweden’s socialist intellectuals rally in support of the man suspected of the murder. It is not the murder that upsets them but the fact that some silly bloggers have linked to public documents and written bad things about him.

This happens every time there is a violent crime in the headlines. The leftist elite is always more concerned with the criminals than the victims. No matter how violent a crime, society is always to blame for the acts of the criminal person.

Check out the iPad Peek website.

I have actually been thinking about getting a tattoo in Hebrew, but this blog has made me rethink that. The very idea of getting a tattooed phrase wrong is enough to make me frightened, but I’m rather scared than scarred.

Yes they can!

I find this passage in the New York Times article particularly interesting:

Two years ago, [biologist Lindsay] Young decided to write a short paper with two colleagues on the female-female albatross pairs. “We were pretty careful in the original article to plainly and simply report what we found,” she said. “It’s definitely a little bit of a tricky subject, and one you want to be gentle on.” But the journal that published the paper, Biology Letters, sent out a press release a few days after the California Supreme Court legalised gay marriage. At 6 the next morning, a Fox News reporter called Young on her cellphone. The resulting story joined others, including one in this paper, and as the news ricocheted around the Internet, a stampede of online commenters alternately celebrated Young’s findings as a clear call for equality or denigrated them as “pure propaganda and selective science at its dumbest” and “an effort to humanise animals or devolve humans to the level of animals or to further an agenda.”

I hope somebody told the online commenters about how animals have been used by Thomas Aquinas and other prominent Christians to legitimise the homophobic agenda. When Thomas began to study animals he sought to confirm his theory about homosexuality being a sign of human sin. The idea was that animals are without sin and ethically superior to human beings. But when Thomas instead found that homosexuality is quite common amongst animals, he changed his mind and decided that animals where ethically inferior to human beings. That is how you make animal behaviour part of an agenda.

Update: John Corvino has written about this, too.

The Council of Europe has adopted a recommendation to member states to “combat discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation or gender identity, to ensure respect for the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons and to promote tolerance towards them”.

This is a welcome move, but we must not forget that the Council of Europe has no powers. It is an organisation set up during the Cold War and should not be mistaken for the European Union.

There’s no end to this blame game. The Vatican seems determined to make gay people responsible for the systematic rape that went on in the Catholic Church for generations.

Turkey’s prime minister says Israel is the main threat to peace in the Middle East. I beg to differ. The biggest threat to peace in the region is Iran. This is the country that arms the terrorists who send rockets into Israel on a daily basis.

Rabbis warn that Israel’s new conversion law and the Jewish state’s reluctance to protect religious freedom could threaten the important relationship with American Jewry. They are right. I don’t think most Israelis understand how angry many Diaspora Jews are.

Rabbi Steven Wernick of the Conservative movement says it well:

“We are Zionists. Fifty percent of the participants in the last AIPAC conference at which PM Netanyahu spoke are Conservative. We are pro-Israel. For us, Jerusalem is our capital, not a settlement. Everything we do stems from a love of Israel.”

Following this disclaimer, he [Rabbi Wernick] charged, “It is about time that the state and Israeli society deal with the question of Jewish pluralism.”

Though the conversion law is a death blow for them, even without it, US Jews are crushed by the country’s conduct on issues of law, justice, and democracy in general, and by the country’s treatment of them in particular, the rabbi says. They are angered that it turns out the Western Wall apparently does not belong to all Jews, but to ultra-Orthodox who have taken over the Western Wall pavilion and are awarded police support.

They are outraged when a Reform rabbi is arrested at the Kotel for donning a prayer shawl or when women seeking to pray there are gruffly pushed aside. Reform and Conservative Jews find it hard to understand why a sovereign democracy does not protect their right to pray at the Western Wall, Wernick explains.

Things look bad for Greece. “With or without support from the EU the bottom line remains that after years of fiscal mismanagement the market has little confidence that Greece can swallow the necessity austerity measures and slash its budget deficit,” one expert says.

Some want to blame the euro, but I think they are wrong. European governments must learn not to escape the economic consequences of populist politics by devaluation, which is only a nice word for cutting the value of people’s property.

The Sabbath is a great thing. I really like the idea of setting one day a week aside for rest and reflection. Unfortunately, I have some writing to do this weekend, so my Sabbath will be all work and no rest. God is not pleased, nor am I.

A few hours ago, Polish President Lech Kaczynski was announced dead. The many gay people he oppressed will not miss him.

During Mr Kaczynski’s time in office, gay people in Poland were deprived even the most fundamental civil liberties. He sent the police to stop peaceful gay-rights demonstrations, he had government officials to actively discriminate against gay people, and he made a big fuss about the Lisbon Treaty granting gay people the same rights as other citizens. People feared for their lives as the police were given the right to treat gay people as criminals.

Poland and Europe will be better with Lech Kaczynski gone.

I saw the film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button a while ago. It wasn’t one of the best films I have seen, but I liked it. The film is based on the short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald and portrays a man who lives his life backwards.

Today I read an essay by British philosopher of religion Pamela Sue Anderson. In the essay, she quotes Søren Kirkegaard:

It is quite true what philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived—forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backwards-looking position.

I don’t know why, but when I read this, my first thought was that the story of Benjamin Button is an attempt to solve that problem. If we were born old and lived to be younger, we could make better use of our youth. With the problem of youth being inexperience and the problem of old age being fatigue, a life lived in reverse would be ideal.

Giacomo Babini, the emeritus bishop of Grosseto, says he believes the Jews are behind the criticism of the Catholic Church’s record on child abuse. He went on to say, “They do not want the church, they are its natural enemies. Deep down, historically speaking, the Jews are God killers.”

The Vatican is desperate to blame others for the Catholic Church’s systematic abuse of young children. Gay people are the main target, but as I reported yesterday, Jews are also blamed. And the blame game continues.

During a visit to Chile yesterday, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican’s second-highest authority, said the sex scandals are linked to homosexuality and not celibacy among priests. “Many psychologists and psychiatrists have demonstrated that there is no relation between celibacy and paedophilia,” the cardinal said. “But many others have demonstrated, I have been told recently, that there is a relation between homosexuality and paedophilia.”

So, were are back to gay people being the true criminals.

But wait a minute! What does every Catholic priest have in common? Is it homosexuality, celibacy, or Christianity? Perhaps it is the Christian faith that makes these men rape children? In a wicked mind, even the most harmless Bible verse can be perverted.

Niclas Berggren blogs about this and quotes Psychology Professor Gregory Herek:

The empirical research does not show that gay or bisexual men are any more likely than heterosexual men to molest children. This is not to argue that homosexual and bisexual men never molest children. But there is no scientific basis for asserting that they are more likely than heterosexual men to do so. And, as explained above, many child molesters cannot be characterised as having an adult sexual orientation at all; they are fixated on children.

And many of them have a very special taste for altar boys after Mass duty.

In an attempt to support Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone’s claim that homosexuality is to blame for the Catholic Church’s systematic abuse of children, the Vatican has presented some statistical data collected by the Congregation for the Doctrine the Faith. The data suggests that about 10% of reported cases were paedophilia in the strict sense, while 90% were cases of sexual attraction in adults to adolescents. About 60% of these cases referred to abuse where both perpetrator and victim were of the same sex.

It is in the Vatican’s interest to make this an issue of homosexuality. If successful, the church can make the case that their opposition to gay rights is a method of tackling child rape.

We must not be fooled by this data. The most obvious explanation for these figures is the fact that Catholic institutions are strictly gender segregated. Natural and healthy sexuality is suppressed and normal relationships between adults are made impossible by the Vatican’s policy of celibacy and its homophobic theology. The problem is not that some men fall in love and have sexual relationships with other men; the problem is the political and theological policies that prevent clergymen from being open about their romantic feelings and sexual relationships. Whenever the Vatican talks about homosexuality, we must put focus back on rape and abuse.

A closeted soldier speaks to The Onion: “Ending ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ is a major step forward for the rights of all gay soldiers. That said, there’s nothing quite like the thrill of approaching a fellow soldier under the cover of night, undressing frantically behind an Abrams tank, and engaging in wild, forbidden intercourse knowing full well that you’ll be kicked out of the military if you’re caught. God. What a rush.”

(For readers who don’t know, The Onion is humour.)

Swedish writer Marcus Birro has some points that he believes the Catholic Church must take immediate steps to incorporate:

• Abolish compulsory celibacy for priests. It is inhumane. It is hostile and loveless.
• Women should be treated in the same way as men and should be afforded the possibility to become deacons and priests.
• Stop the oppression of homosexuals.
• Repeal the ban on contraception. It’s from the Stone Age and it’s inhumane.

Wouldn’t it be great if the Pope listened!

From The Daily What.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, says the America’s atomic weapons are a tool of terror and intimidation. I suggest the theocratic tyrant looks closer to home. It is not the United States that has threatened to eradicate a country from the map; it is Iran’s dictator-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that makes these kinds of threats.

It may come as no surprise to Mac fans that Apple’s products are the most popular in metropolitan areas where people are known to be open-minded. Here are the top five cities for Apple in America:

1. San Francisco
2. Boston
3. San Diego
4. New York
5. Washington, DC

When it comes to computers, I am very elitist. Working on a Microsoft-run PC is like driving a used Volvo.

A giant ash cloud caused by an erupted volcano in Iceland has made European air travel impossible, and thousands of people are now forced to spend days on ill-equipped buses across the continent. But the far-left lunatics are joyful. In the mind of the class warrior, “rich” people from Europe deserve pain and suffering.

Hans Lind of the Swedish branch of Save the Children is a perfect example of the socialists’ complete lack of empathy. In his blog, he suggests that families trapped on buses without toilets refrain from drinking beer and put their children in nappies.

It says something about how the elite travellers of NGOs think of ordinary people. Drinking beer is not what parents do when travelling with small children on buses through Europe. And to solve the lack of toilet facilities with nappies is simply not a solution.

Needless to say, Hans Lind has no children, and he travels the world in first class. He is a socialist activist and used to be a member of the Swedish Communist Party. Now he is the manager of Save the Children’s regional office in Latin America. He is quite typical of the jet-set socialists that pollute the world with their moralist smugness.

Update: Hans Lind noticed my criticism and replied by—you guessed it—some irrelevant remarks about Israeli politics. I criticise him for mocking European families tapped on ill-equipped buses and his first thought is to bring up Israel.

My parents have been stuck on a Spanish island since Friday. Yesterday, they were flown to mainland Europe for a two-day bus ride to Sweden. My mother has a rare medical condition that makes her dependent on drugs that are not easy to get hold of without a special licence. I have been worried because I know she only has enough pills for one more day. So, I was relived when I learned that she and my father would be able to travel by air to some airport in Scandinavia (probably Gothenburg or Stockholm) later today.

If you belong to the group of alarmist environmentalists who fear carbon dioxide more than anything, perhaps this consequence of Europe’s grounded aeroplanes will make you excited.

Today, on the fifth day of Iyyar in the Hebrew calendar, Israel celebrates Independence Day. Sixty-two years ago, David Ben-Gurion stood before the Jewish People’s Council in Tel Aviv and read aloud the Declaration of Establishment of the state of Israel. After nearly two millennia of constant oppression and involuntary exile, the Jewish people had returned to their homeland.

From Ynetnews:

“The public in Israel is not familiar enough with the patterns of life of its brothers across the world,” says Dr. Goldplem, head of the Center of Jewish Education in the Diaspora at the Lifshiz College. According to him, the Israeli public in general, and the religious youth in particular, believe that the patterns of life of Jews worldwide are very similar to their own.

“Many concepts, like Reform and Conservative Judaism, are unfamiliar to the religious youth from the angle of a Jews living abroad. For example, the legitimacy given to the Reform and Conservative public abroad is not understood by the religious youth, and so finding a common language between religious youth in Israel and religious youth abroad is nearly impossible.”

In my opinion, this is one is if the really big threats to Israel today.

Swedish social workers forced a 10-year-old girl to undergo an examination to check whether she had been subjected to genital mutilation. A court has now ruled that they did wrong.

I don’t have the time to write about it now, so I just want to say that I welcome this ruling.

A new report suggests unemployment amongst ultra-Orthodox men in Israel has risen by 200% in the past thirty years. This group is growing, and the question of how these people will be fed in the future. Right now, many in the community survive through state benefits and by selling religious handicraft to Jews around the world. But with a growing ultra-Orthodox population, I can’t see how the demand for mezuzot and tefillin will be able to provide enough income. Add to this that most ultra-Orthodox men refuse military service and you have potentially a large social problem in Israel.

I was at the Swedish Drug Users Union’s annual seminar on drug policy in 2008, but I will not be able to this year. But here is some advertisement for the event, which will take place in Stockholm on 9 June. More information here.

Read More

A headline in The Local reads, “Volcano Forces Early End to Swedish Rail Monopoly”. From the article:

Travel disruption caused by the volcanic eruption in southern Iceland has prompted the Swedish government to announce that it will lift the monopoly on key routes run by national rail operator SJ.

The move is intended to boost capacity by encouraging more rail operators to ply the routes which were due to opened up to market competition in the autumn.

Canadian socialist millionairess Naomi Klein was right! The evil free-marketeers use natural disasters to force liberty on people. How awful!

Amazing images from Daily Mail.

I’m reading a collection of philosophical essays that drains me on energy and severely affect my ability to think of anything else. The blog suffers as my mind is occupied with the question of truth. What is truth? How do we know what is the truth? Is correspondence to facts a criterion for truth, or is coherence enough? And what about consensus as a requirement for truth? With increasing fascination, I find myself attracted to the coherence theory, which Harold Joachim defines as, “Truth in its essential nature is that systematic coherence which is the character of a significant whole.”

Quotation from H. H. Joachim, The Nature of Truth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 76.

Interesting things are happening in the ongoing British election campaign. New Labour under Prime Minister Gordon Brown are as dead as, well, death. Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats under leader Nick Clegg seems to better than ever. And now people are talking openly about a coalition centre-right government of the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives. I would very much welcome that. I believe such a coalition could bring out the best of both parties. The Conservatives would have an excuse for not giving in to the anti-Europe sentiments within their party while the Liberal Democrats would be able to better handle the leftist wing of their party. In a few weeks, we could have a truly progressive government in London—one that embraces the free market, gay rights, globalisation, and European integration.

I don’t know who made this website with the Swedish king in silly hats, but it’s quite funny.

Terrorist organisation Hamas has kept Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit hostage for 1,400 days. It’s time to get him out. Negotiating with Hamas is no solution.

The British Conservative Party has suspended one if its candidates in Scotland after he voiced support for racism and homophobia. Good for Tories. When I lived in Britain in the late 1980s, quite a few Tory politicians—especially at local level—were openly racist and homophobic. It makes me happy to see that the party has come a long way since and now distance itself from such ideas. Too bad it hasn’t done the same in the European Parliament.

Evo Morales has found the cause that homophobes have sought for ages. Jewish mothers should be warned—the chicken soup makes you sons gay!

Personally, I have a similar theory about socialism. I think this ideology is caused by a combination of smugness and red wine.

From former First Lady Laura Bush’s forthcoming autobiography:

In 2004 the social question that animated the campaign was gay marriage. Before the election season had unfolded, I had talked to George about not making gay marriage a significant issue. We have, I reminded him, a number of close friends who are gay or whose children are gay. But at that moment I could never have imagined what path this issue would take and where it would lead.

It is a well-known secret that many politicians in Washington are homophobic for show. Privately, they hold opposite views to those voiced in public. They simply do not have the courage to confront their voters on gay rights.

I’m listening to some old songs by Leonard Cohen. And it hits me how sad it is that so many people don’t get the references that create the beauty of his lyrics.

Islamist terrorists have threatened to kill innocent people if Comedy Central broadcast two episodes of cartoon comedy “South Park”. After hundreds of years of struggle for free speech and democracy, Europe and America surrender to backward Islamists. Shame!

Many Jews in the Netherlands seem to appreciate Islamophobic politician Geert Wilders. But not everyone:

Annette Atiya said she took offence at the callous way Wilders singled out one minority. “Precisely what happened in Jewish history,” she reflected. Many in the Jewish community share her opinion, Rabbi Menno ten Brink, of the Liberal Jewish Community in Amsterdam, for instance. “Wilders is stigmatising an entire segment of the population,” he said “This has led to a lot of trouble for us Jews in the past. I will not stand for it.”

Exactly right. To single out one ethno-religious group the way Wilders does is xenophobic. His attacks on Islam and Muslims have very little to do with sincere criticism. He hates Muslims, and like Christian anti-Semites before him, he blames an entire group of people for the crimes of the few. Jews who likes Wilders’s bigoted ideas should perhaps read what Theodor Herzl wrote about Alfred Dreyfus and the collective guilt that was placed upon French Jewry for his alleged crimes.