Soldier Beheaded in Islamist Terror Attack in London

Two suspected terrorists were shot by armed police after attacking a pedestrian, believed to be a soldier, with a machete-style knife close to military barracks in an ‘Islamist attack’.

The Telegraph:

Local MP Nick Raynsford said he had been told the man attacked in the street was a soldier serving at the Royal Artillery Barracks near the attack.

Mr Raynsford said the soldier had been returning to the barracks after a day out when he was attacked.

London Ambulance Service said one man, believed to be the victim of the machete attack, had died in the incident and two others were injured, one seriously.

Several witnesses described seeing a “beheading” while another described seeing a man wearing a Help for Heroes T-shirt being attacked with a machete-style knife and dumped.

The Telegraph is doing live updates as this horrific story unfold here.

And via the Guardian:

Brandishing a cleaver and a knife, and with the body of the victim lying yards away, the man said: “We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you. The only reason we have done this is because Muslims are dying every day. This British soldier is an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

 

Barbarism!

And just a few days ago we posted God Save the Queen.

Britain will be a Muslim country within the next 50 years or so…

 

Man Commits Suicide Inside Notre Dame

Some 1,500 visitors were cleared out of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris after a man put a letter on the altar of the 850-year-old monument Tuesday, pulled out a gun and shot himself in the head.

It’s the first suicide in decades at the landmark site, Monsignor Patrick Jacquin, the cathedral’s rector, told The Associated Press.

“It’s unfortunate, it’s dramatic, it’s shocking,” Jacquin said.  The motives for the suicide, and the contents of the man’s letter, were unclear.

The Paris prosecutor’s office identified the man as 78-year-old Dominique Venner.

Venner’s blog describes him as a historian and essayist, and includes description of his involvement in the campaign against France’s new law authorizing gay marriage. In some posts he criticizes “massive immigration” and what he describes as encroaching Islam; others include historical analysis of revolution or American-European relations.

It says he fought with French forces against Algerian independence fighters a half-century ago in a war that ended with France losing its most prized colony.

Police ushered people out of the cathedral after the shooting, Interior Minister Manuel Valls told reporters from the grand stone plaza in front of Notre Dame. “We call for compassion,” he said.

“Notre Dame is the cathedral of Paris, one of the capital’s – and the country’s – most beautiful monuments, so we realize how symbolic this event truly is.”

It’s highly unusual for the cathedral, visited by some 13 million people from around the world every year, to be evacuated.

Police, the Paris prosecutor and church employees gathered inside the cathedral, while puzzled tourists crowded outside on the island in the Seine River that has been home to the cathedral since the 12th century.

The cathedral reopened for an evening service that church officials said would include a prayer for the man who committed suicide and other struggling souls.

Tuesday’s death comes less than a week after another unusual suicide in central Paris, when a man shot himself in front of a dozen schoolchildren at a private Catholic school in the French capital.

Jacquin said a few people had committed suicide by jumping from Notre Dame’s two towers, but he had no knowledge of anyone ever committing suicide on the altar. The Eiffel Tower occasionally shuts down because of suicides or attempts to jump off its ledges.

Source

UPDATE:  Topless Woman Arrested At Notre Dame Cathedral

A topless activist of the FEMEN movement was arrested inside Notre Dame Cathedral Wednesday, one day after far-right essayist and historian Dominique Vesser committed suicide in the Paris landmark.

The bare-chested woman was photographed in front of the altar, pointing a fake gun at her mouth. The slogan “May Fascists Rest In Hell” was written across her torso.

FEMEN leader Inna Schevchenko commented to Le HuffPost that the protest was a message to “anyone who supports fascism and who honored the memory of the extreme-right militant who committed suicide at Notre Dame.”

On Tuesday, 78-year-old far-right activist Dominique Venner took his own life in front of the altar inside the Cathedral. According to the Associated Press, Venner ran a blog that included pieces criticizing immigration and gay marriage.

On its Facebook page, FEMEN France called the topless activist “FEMEN’s angel of Death”…

The Cathedral is desecrated.

 

Let the Cloning Obfuscation Begin

Wesley J. Smith in the National Review:

Now that human cloning is upon us, look for many scientists and their camp followers (or ignorant reporters) to mislead about what the technology entails. Human SCNT creates human embryos through asexual means. It does not create stem cells. To obtain cloned stem cells, the embryos have to be nurtured and maintained in a dish for about 10 days, destroyed, and the stem cell lines derived.

But don’t look for the embryo part to make many stories. Early case in point, a story by Loren Grush on FNC:

In a major medical breakthrough, researchers at the Oregon National Primate Research Center (ONPRC) have for the first time ever successfully converted human skin cells into embryonic stem cells–via a technique called nuclear transfer. The research has major implications for the future of medical treatments, as many believe embryonic stem cells are the key to treating damaged cells lost through injury or illness.  According to various medical researchers, stem cell therapy has the potential to treat anything from heart disease and spinal cord injuries to major neurological diseases, like Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis.

Through a common laboratory method known as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), ONPRC scientists, along with researchers at Oregon Health & Science University, essentially swapped the genetic codes of an unfertilized egg and a human skin cell to create their new embryonic stem cells…The combination of the egg’s cytoplasm and the skin cell’s nucleus eventually grows and develops into the embryonic stem cell.

False! Repeat after me: The unfertilized egg is not turned into stem cells. Rather, in the same cloning process as resulted in Dolly the sheep, it becomes an embryo, which is destroyed to obtain the cells. Moreover, the process is hardly common. In fact, this is the first time SCNT has worked in humans. That’s why it’ a big story!

The human cloning issue is going go be a Mt. Everest of ethical contention. If we are going to discuss this rationally, we need accurate information from the scientists and the media. I plan to hold both to account in this regard going forward.

 

Blast Hits Catholic Church in Northern Tanzania

Reuters:

A suspected bomb blast struck a Catholic church in the northern Tanzanian town of Arusha on Sunday, police said, wounding a number of people.

Sectarian tensions have been simmering in east Africa’s second biggest economy after two Christian leaders were killed in the predominantly Muslim islands of Zanzibar earlier this year and there have been attacks on Muslim leaders and mosques.

“Some kind of explosion went off at the church. It is believed to have been a bomb but we don’t know what type of bomb it was,” Tanzania police spokesperson Advera Senso said.

Senso could not confirm if anyone had been killed in the attack or how many had been wounded.

Tanzania’s foreign affairs minister Bernard Membe said in a message on Twitter he was “deeply shocked” by the explosion.

President Jakaya Kikwete has warned about rising religious tensions in several televised addresses.

 

Islamic Radicals Have Turned Nigeria Into a Christian Killing Field

CBN:

Last year more Christians were killed in Nigeria than any other country. The onslaught of bombings gave Nigeria the sad distinction of being the nation with the highest Christian death toll.

More than 900 Christians reportedly were killed in Nigeria in 2012, all victims of the Boko Haram group and other Islamic militants.

“They are so radical they don’t even spare Muslims. If Muslims are sympathetic to any cause at all…if they are sympathetic to the Christians cause, or the minorities cause, they are also termed as infidels,” Mark Lipdo, program coordinator for the Stefanos Foundation, said.

In 2013, radicals have killed more than 120 Nigerians, most of them Christians.

Gregory Lar, an international human rights attorney, said, “It is happening at this time because it appears there is a new resurgence, a new Islamic awareness in the need to propagate their religion.”

The new wave of violence has caused various groups in Southern Nigeria to take up arms. They are determined to protect Christians.

Attorney Emmanuel Ogebe warns the country may be on the brink of broader conflict.

More here.

 

Pro-choice, Peanuts

HT

 

Bibles Burned in Welsh Church

The fallen world we live in…

None of the church’s valuable items were taken during the break-in, but a stained glass window was smashed using a vase from the graveyard and Bibles and hymn books were burned.

Rev Goronwy Evans, minister at the church for 46 years, believes that they burned the holy books in an “abysmal” attempt to set the church on fire.

“In this day and age break-ins are a part of life, but it was shocking to see what they had done,” he said.

The scene was discovered by a woman who was bringing flowers to her mother’s grave in the churchyard at Brondeifi Unitarian Chapel, in Lampeter, Ceredigion, south west Wales.

It has been estimated that the intruders caused £1,000 worth of damage.

The fire at the Gothic chapel, which has only had three ministers since it was built in 1876, did not threaten the structure of the building and only spread several feet.

Lampeter county councillor Hag Harris said: “It’s extremely worrying for everybody. In different circumstances the chapel could have been lost. It is an important centre and an historic building in this community.”

The vandals got into the building on St David’s Day by smashing a leaded stained glass window with a vase taken from one of the graves in the churchyard. They then gained access to the rest of the Chapel through the boiler room.

Once inside, the vandals made their way to the minister’s vestry where they set fire to a table, bookshelves and cupboards containing personal items, hymn books and bibles.

An organ, currently in the process of being renovated with funds from the church’s congregation, escaped from the incident unscathed.

Police have been gathering evidence from the scene, including footprints. Investigations are continuing.

Rev Evans said: “It was such a shock. When I got there on Saturday afternoon I just looked around and thought ‘What have they been doing?’ They didn’t take anything, so it could have been worse, but it doesn’t make it any better.

“Trying to set the place on fire was abysmal,” Rev Evans added. “It was more through luck than judgment that we still have a church and not a shell. We all just hope it won’t happen again.”

 

 

The Prayer Shawls of Auschwitz

A post over at Cranmer which simply must be reproduced in full:

Those who have visited Auschwitz are likely to find their thoughts straying back there on this day of Holocaust remembrance.

A visit both underwhelms with the very ordinariness of the buildings, yet at the same time the significance overwhelms, as Auschwitz reaffirms its special place in the pit of human history.

A visit needs to be approached like a pilgrimage, with preparation, otherwise there will be a numbing of the experience, a confusion of conflicting emotions which may encompass anger, indignation, bewilderment and the deepest sadness. The reactions of others around you may mirror your own, yet they may not, and that too can be a challenge. Some seem visibly shocked, some deeply affected, some struggle, whilst others present as merely curious and that response can be a challenge as it may offends one’s own interpretation.

The Holocaust was possible because the humanity of the rejected was stripped away from them as it was, is, and always will be from the unwanted, yesterday, today, and tomorrow, wherever we are in the world.

Holocaust Memorial Day needs its universal dimension.

There, all humanity was killed in a systematic, planned way; not in anger, but simply because that is what the state said needed to be done, and someone had to do it.

It has to be universal, but it also has to be rooted in places like Auschwitz, which shows how genocide moves beyond the personal killing of Abel by Cain. Here it is shown in all its bureaucratic, banal evil. Hair is cropped and piled here, children’s shoes collected and dumped over there.

When I visited, I realised that I would need to take a Bible and that I should find a suitable quiet place to read it. I decided on Psalm 88 and Psalm 10. I invite you to read them. You will find there the anguish of those who wore the prayer shawls captured in verse after verse.

Psalm 88 O LORD God of my salvation, have cried day and night before thee: let my prayer come before thee: incline thine ear unto my cry; for my soul is full of troubles: and my life draweth nigh unto the grave. I am counted with them that go down into the pit: I am as a man that hath no strength: free among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, whom thou rememberest no more: and they are cut off from thy hand. Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit, in darkness, in the deeps. Thy wrath lieth hard upon me, and thou hast afflicted me with all thy waves.

Psalm 10 Why standest thou afar off, O LORD? Why hidest thou thyself in times of trouble? The wicked in his pride doth persecute the poor: let them be taken in the devices that they have imagined. For the wicked boasteth of his heart’s desire, and blesseth the covetous, whom the LORD abhorreth. The wicked, through the pride of his countenance, will not seek after God: God is not in all his thoughts. His ways are always grievous; thy judgments are far above out of his sight: as for all his enemies, he puffeth at them. He hath said in his heart, I shall not be moved: for I shall never be in adversity.

These Psalms surely must have been prayed under those shawls.

Psalm 88 is particularly striking because of its steadfast refusal to find any cause for optimism. “Life is grim,” says the Psalmist. “I know it is grim, God – you know it is grim.”

‘Let’s not kid each other’ is the subtext.

It concludes with no verse of praise, no expectation of redemption, no hope. This is why I think Psalm 88 must have been the Psalm for Auschwitz. The evil was so evil that it takes mortal man beyond hope.

Yet surprisingly Psalm 10 begins to recover from the blow. It ends:

O LORD thou wilt hear the desire of the meek thou wilt strengthen their heart thou wilt incline thine ear to do justice to the fatherless and the oppressed so that man who is of the earth may strike terror no more.

I chose to read these psalms before I went, and I found the place to contemplate their meaning as I stood before those prayer shawls displayed as if on a gibbet in a cabinet. Surely these psalms expressed the prayers of those who suffered and prayed under them.

Many who are separated from the scriptures by the modern world may be shocked by their candour, directness, and anger. God is no stranger to the outrage of those who suffer. Two things are striking: Psalm 88 is in the same spirit as those who urged Job to ‘Curse God and die’. Psalm 10, which retains hope, pre-figures the ‘Song of Mary’ – The Magnificat.

Contrast:

Let them be taken in the devices that they have imagined For the wicked boasteth of his heart’s desire

with

He has scattered the Proud in the imagination of their hearts.

And so God did.

So He did.

The underlying sin of Auschwitz and the genocidal killer is that of Adam himself -  Pride. The proud have supplanted the judgment of God with the judgment of themselves. They take to themselves the right to judge and the power of life and death itself, and when Man does that, it leads to places like Auschwitz.

It does not last. If the world hates His people, it hated Him first and God is not mocked for long.

Auschwitz also teaches that early in its story the Atheist Nazi State consigned to the camp the leaders of Polish Church lest it speak its truths, hold its peoples to hope, and challenge the inhumanity of what was to come, and the pride that underpinned it.

As God sent His son, so it sent His Church.

Amongst those was Maximillian Kolbe,  ‘The Saint of Auschwitz, who lit a feint light in the darkness by laying down his life in place of another man. His story is worth reading today: it is one of sacrifice and the triumph of faith and hope.

Yet there is another lesson and paradox to be found at Auschwitz today. It is full of living Jews. Young Jews, confident Jews, handsome young men and beautiful young girls, tanned and healthy carrying their flag. They, too, are on pilgrimage and have prepared themselves for it.

They represent the refusal to allow the triumph of those who hated them then and who hate them today. Their presence demonstrates the power of hope in all places of despair, the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.

God will not have it any other way. As the Jewish singer-poet Leonard Cohen has written: ‘There is a crack in everything – that’s how the light gets in.’

It is true about our fractured humanity, our brittle pride, and our broken hearts.

Before the Prayer Shawls of Auschwitz, it is possible to doubt and to cry out, “How can this happen? How can this be redeemed?”

With His living Church and His Chosen People, the answer comes back on this and every other day: ‘Because with God – all things are possible’.

(Posted by Brother Ivo)

Will South Africans Ever Be Shocked by Rape?

The BBC:

At a time when Indians are re-examining their society in the light of a single, horrific incident of gang rape, South Africa seems numb – unable to muster much more than a collective shrug in the face of almost unbelievably grim statistics – seemingly far worse than India’s.

Here almost 60,000 rapes are reported to the police each year – more than double the number in India, in a far smaller country.

Experts believe the true figure is at least 10 times that – 600,000 attacks

It is not that the issue is ignored – far from it.

This week South African newspapers are carrying gruesome stories of what is being described as a new trend – the rape of elderly grandmothers, mostly in rural communities…

Read the rest including a video report here.

 

Britain’s First Atheist ‘Church’ Opens Its Doors

Meanwhile,

On Sunday, Britain’s first atheist church held its very first meeting at The Nave, a former church-turned-performance space, in Islington, North London.

According to the Islington Gazette, stand-up comedians Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans founded the so-called godless church because they wanted a space where non-religious folks could commune and edify one another.

The Huffington Post UK explains that the church, dubbed “Sunday Assembly,” has been “championed as [a] chance for disillusioned former believers, nostalgic atheists and anybody searching for a sense of community, to meet and ‘turn good intentions into action.’”

According to the Independent, about 200 worshippers showed up to the service, held on Jan. 6. The congregation focused on the theme of “Beginnings,” deliberating over ways that success can be achieved by letting go of past failures and avoiding “mental booby traps.” Instead of a sermon, the church invited Andy Stanton, a popular children’s book author, to talk about overcoming the odds and achieving success; and instead of praying together, those gathered were encouraged at one point to close their eyes and meditate on their fears of inadequacy and failure.  With Jones taking the stage as MC, the congregation was also treated to some stand-up comedy. A rendition of Oasis’ “Don’t Look Back In Anger” was even sung during the gathering.

Going forward, the “Sunday Assembly” is scheduled to meet on the first Sunday of every month.

Not everyone is open to prospect of an atheist church, however. Some have accused Jones and Evans of pulling an elaborate publicity stunt; others argue that the conflation of atheism and religious practices is troubling.

“How can you be an atheist and worship in a church? Surely it’s a contradiction of terms. Who will they be singing to?” London Catholic parish priest Rev. Saviour Grech said to the Islington Gazette. “It is important to debate and engage with atheists[,] but for them to establish a church like any other religious denomination is going too far. I’m cautious about it.”

And it’s not just religious individuals who have expressed concern. As The Huffington Post UK notes, atheists too have voiced unease: “Critics have suggested by holding the meeting in an old church, (albeit deconsecrated) and by following a format of songs interspersed by reading and addresses, the comedians are at risk of turning atheism into its own sort of religion.”

Rest here.

A ‘church’ without God? How progressive…