Silly Bankers

In his diaries, the late and gloriously camp Kenneth Williams often used the euphemism 'Having a Barclays' for the act of masturbation, and it seems to me no accident that 'Barclays' or 'banker' continues as handy rhyming slang for a person who is stupid or of low character.
Barclays always was, and still is, an awful bank, and it's a pretty good bet that wherever you find sweatshops, child labour, dodgy arms deals or 21^st century slavery you will find a helpful man from that establishment if you look hard enough.

Which makes it even funnier when the PR department for the local Barclays tries to intimate it has a cuddly management who care about the dispossessed of the world and want to make things right. Now, on reading this sledgehammer-subtle piece of hackery (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/recognised-for-operation-christmas-child-efforts-1-6347796 ) I don't think even for a second Barclays actually gave money to these chancers, but it's doubly funny when the muppets who run the gaff fall for a scam which shouldn't have fooled anybody apart from home-schooled Alabama rednecks. And, of course, triple funny when reading the comments and realising that island educational standards are even lower than Alabama.

Oh, if you don't already know why I'm alternately laughing my socks off and banging my head against a wall in sheer disbelief, just go to https://sites.google.com/site/occalert/ .

And believe me, as someone who's monitored this and similar scams since Franklin Graham and his shady peers started thinking them up, the OCC Alert site is remarkably polite.  

When you start to find stories elsewhere of, for example, Franklin Graham trying to persuade George Bush to send bibles instead of aid to saturation-bombed Iraq, or Samaritan's Purse telling victims of a South American disaster that they could only shelter in tents subsidised by US Aid if they attended Baptist services and effectively renounced their Catholic upbringings, then you might see why even the Southern Baptist Convention wants nothing to do with Graham any more.

I would like to believe that in 2014 the island can finally wise up to such nonsense. But reading the inane comments I know that is still far too much to ask.

But I still wish you all the best for 2014, in the hope that at least some of us can both laugh and rise above such idiocy.

Of freaks who come out at night

A while back I was laughing at the clueless ‘street pastor’ scheme, whereby those few special constables the Manx police force can persuade to patrol Douglas’s deadly dull streets as the pubs chuck out now at least have brightly clad evangelical ‘care in the community’ cases to talk to.

As I said at the time, this bonkers phenomenon seems to be taking off in quiet towns with no history of late night disturbances – which seemed odd. The only common traits seemed to be grandstanding small town politicians along with close links between redneck police forces and the most mentally challenged brands of the godbothering racket. In short, a recipe for more faith-based lunacy and another drain on the rates.

It was no surprise that such nonsense would eventually reach the island – given the number of what P. J. O’Rourke calls ‘moral buttinskis’ blundering around government buildings looking for a handout – but if geriatric spinsters want to make up for wasted lives by watching daft adolescents spew down their tasteless T-shirts around Friday midnight, let them. Got to be more fun than flower arranging or whatever else they spent their previous six or seven decades doing.

Now a friend ‘across the water’ (he's another close observer of faith-based lunacy) has more evidence of this fad. It started when he noticed a Guardian article (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/aug/21/street-pastors-beaches-young-people) uncritically parrot an obvious press release (see in more detail at http://www.christianpost.com/news/uk-ministry-patrols-beach-town-assists-drunk-youth-80381/ ). So far, so unsurprising. Private Eye, amongst others, has noted that even the press bible of the bleeding heart liberal is carrying rather a lot of one-sided twaddle from rank amateurs at present – possibly linked to the same falling sales and staff layoffs the entire print press industry is seeing.

Then he looked further and saw much more on the same line, such as http://www.leightonbuzzardonline.co.uk/community/boost-for-street-pastors-1-4176829 , or http://www.thisisscunthorpe.co.uk/Gran-87-Messingham-believed-oldest-street-pastor/story-16726376-detail/story.html , or http://www.newswales.co.uk/index.cfm?section=Community&F=1&id=24896 and

http://www.bromsgroveadvertiser.co.uk/news/9861831.Street_pastors_prepare_to_step_out_in_Bromsgrove/ .

Note at once – eerily similar claims and stories, which give away the source of all such stories as a common one, which is certainly not any of the dreary bible-bashers currently causing small town drunks to redecorate high street pavements with even more of the alcohol and spirits industry’s produce even faster.

The stunning thing about these phenomena is that the movement has spread around the UK without one police force doing background checks which should immediately interest any half-awake Fraud Squad. 

The 'charity' behind it is the Ascension Trust, which has actually been registered twice. First in 1994, when it managed to run until 2010 without once filing accounts or even basic information to the England & Wales Charity Commission. In turn,  behind that was an odd evangelical from Ghana who I seem to remember was the subject of numerous complaints and suspicions - never investigated because of his friendship with police officers who tried to introduce the Guardian Angels (also closely linked with evangelicals - Seventh Day Adventists in that case) to London. 

In 2008 the Ascension Trust re-registered but still didn't file any accounts until 2010 (i.e. the last possible moment before the Charity Commission could have instigated strike-off). The source of £682,20K of the £776.20K declared income is described only vaguely as ‘charitable activities’, and the 'charity' doesn't do any fundraising. In short, since 1994 the charity has never made any satisfactory explanation as to how it raises funds or what it does with the loot, and has been allowed to get away with this on the dubious grounds that it is a religious group 'helping' busy police with good works.

If you check the latest examples, you'll see that the new groups tend to start in quiet towns with no record of late night violence and general drunken disorder, and the volunteers tend to be elderly white churchgoers of limited education and - well, let's just say they tend to have had quiet lives!  This is significant, as is the way that new groups spring up in areas where godbotherers have more than a little influence on local police through police liaison committees and so on, and also places where professional police officers are being pulled off the street in favour of either special constables or those community wardens/police support officers (i.e. volunteers and part-timers with little or no training and no powers of arrest).

 Police, councils and indeed the organisers of the new groups have all bought into the myth that the charity started in inner-city, multi-racial London giving practical help to police and calming potentially violent situations - a myth which seems ever less likely, especially given that the first version of the trust was so carelessly recorded by officialdom. As the new groups spring up, the original myth is being buried and only the claimed exploits of the new volunteers are recorded by journos who don't find time to look further, and the press cuttings in turn are the evidence offered for the next group along the line to start. Perhaps there's also some sort of franchise deal where the groups are expected to make a contribution to the Ascension Trust from whatever 'expenses' or 'charitable donations' local authorities make to their 'patrols'.

Steady little earner for the trustees, I’m sure, but probably only par for the course. Evangelical scamsters everywhere feed on not so much actual social unrest as the lazy tabloid mythologising, then use it to pimp their dubious schemes to cash-strapped local authorities. Public money is thrown down the drain, but no actual lives are altered for the better. All window-dressing, but do we blame the venal bible-bashers and their pyramid schemes, incompetent local authorities, lying local politicians, or lazy local press? Or all of the above?

And should we worry enough to stop it, or should we just have a quiet chuckle at yet another crazy addition to the curious subculture that passes for modern nightlife?

(hat tip to John Hunt)

Aggressive beggar alert

I see from this (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/street-angels-help-keep-douglas-town-centre-safe-1-4614060 ) that, as Douglas streets have been so safe late at night for years, the police have had to draft in troublemakers so that they can pick up enough overtime.

Think about this for a few seconds – if the police are willing to allow muddle-headed if sincere septuagenerarians to pester drunks, then the midnight streets of Douglas must be quieter than a Trappist monastery.

This nonsense has been tried before, mostly, it must be noted, in redneck backwaters of the UK where both incest and membership of the Christian Police Association is high (not that those three factors are always found together, of course – just alarmingly often). There, surveys of the relative figures for street-based violence before and after the introduction of such crackpot schemes inevitably show more disturbances and hospital visits AFTER the bible bashing started.

The funniest thing is that in some small towns there simply were no disturbances until the godbotherers started annoying people making their way home amicably enough from pubs and clubs. Perhaps the key here is that people in conservative communities might head for the pub to escape miserable puritans they have to put up with during the day, for example at work. If so, the last thing they want looming up at them after a couple of pints is that prod nosed supervisor who has been on their case all week about wearing an ‘inappropriate’ tie to the office.

This plan hasn’t appeared out of the blue, by the way. I was aware of a Broadway Baptist klingon trying to set up a ‘street pastor’ scheme five years ago, and since then, so disgruntled insiders say, there have been several approaches to the police from both Living Hell and the Batshits.

The irony is that one of their previous attempts at ‘street ministry’ so annoyed the public that it led to senior police officers being asked if the English crime of ‘aggressive begging’ (used in the UK to keep panhandling junkies way from tourists) was on the books over here. As families with small kids walking down the Prom being harangued by evangelical loons said, if threatening small kids and pensioners with hell fire isn’t demanding money with menaces, then what is?

Old hippies may also be sniggering at that acronym ‘DTCP’, which sounds very similar to ‘PCP’ – a nasty street drug in the 1970’s always associated with nutters jumping through windows, and better known as ‘Angel Dust’.

On a more serious note – who are the ‘other agencies’ so keen for the police to OK this nonsense? Not, by an odd coincidence, a certain ‘police advisory committee’ whose very membership is tightly controlled by three evangelical business figures (so convenient when you want to close down a small town for a bit of godbothering theatricality and police are needed to guide punters to the only available parking which is – oh, another coincidence – at your shopping centre)?

Thought so.

Exporting lies, extracting money, destroying community

There is a rash of recent Manx press stories at this time of year which suggest that local schools, businesses and other social groups have helped people in poorer countries to have a better Christmas. You can read one example at http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/telecom_staff_send_off_festive_cheer_in_shoeboxes_1_2853540.
To be blunt, they were conned (and I include local organisers in this), and they haven't.
To get some idea of the parties really behind this scam take a look at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/12/sarah-palin-haiti-visit , and note the stories of past 'aid projects' from 1994 and 2001.
I could also tell you that, a few years ago, I spoke to a Lutheran minister in Romania. She was one of a remarkable group of clerics led by a bishop whose sermons were so popular that, when the Securitate tried to break them up, it kickstarted a chain of events which eventually led to the overthrow of Ceacescu.
This cleric told me that, frankly, Samaritans Purse and other evangelical US missions were the cause of more community tension than Ceacescu and his crew ever managed to stir up in order to keep themselves in power and privilege. Foreign 'charity' was simply not necessary in communities where neighbours looked out for each other and shared what they had.
Local churches worked perfectly well and perfectly openly and were respected even by non-religious neighbours. Local public services, schools and hospitals were staffed by dedicated, if underpaid, professionals despite the open corruption of Romanian politicians.
Actually, it is a good thing they do, because after a quick photo or two for next year's publicity appeals, as in the Palin example, the SP are gone. The boxes, if ever distributed, go as a sort of token dividend to poor folk who've signed up and paid up through the nose to US churches, most of whose profits go back to the US.
Franklin Graham's empire has a $500 million annual turnover in the US alone, and being a religious 'charitable foundation' pays no tax. It owns planes, fleets of trucks, printing presses, state-of-the-art film and recording studios...... Do you really think it needs your £1 coins too?
Or look at it another way.
Romanians, like people in most of the countries where religious scams like SP work, show a level of community solidarity that puts us to shame and which we long ago lost. They may have older houses, cars and clothes than some of us, but it isn't a problem to them.
They get by and, unlike us, look out for their neighbours. The idea that a pensioner in, say, a dormitory village like Kirk Michael could fall over and lie on their kitchen floor for a week without a neighbour noticing is unbelievable to my friends and relatives in East Europe.
So why are you helping pondlife like Graham to not only steal from those communities but destroy them?

Birthday babblings

I was offline yesterday to have one of those ‘significant annual events’. You know, the ones that make you wonder where your youth went and how much longer before senility sets in.
This year’s went well- the first when everyone finally heeded a request I made years back and stopped buying me presents. Not wishing to be ungrateful, but I have enough junk already, I’ve never worked out the correct time to allow before quietly slipping unwanted things into charity shops, and anyway, almost all of the Manx charity shops add to the sum of misery, rather than diminish it, so I even have second thoughts about donating stuff I can’t use to them.
It was also the first when I managed to persuade those who want to give to a charity in my name instead of to me to support a genuine good cause, rather than ‘buy a cow’ for one of the multinationals posing as aid agencies who make up the DEC – or worse! And if you still need evidence as to why I avoid the DEC, try, for example http://www.tearfund.org/Jobseekers/Statement+Of+Faith.htm - required signing for all Tearfund voluntary or professional workers to sort out the godbotherers from the damned – or look at the entries for, say, CAFOD or Christian Aid at http://www.fakecharities.org/.
If nothing else, the Haiti crisis caused us heathens to look critically at the whole international aid issue, and thankfully people are now wising up. International atheist opinion seems to support my tentative opinion that Red Cross and Medicin sans Frontiers are the safest bets if you’re giving.
I long ago decided to ignore ‘emergency appeals’ anyway. In a chance universe, disasters happen and the innocent victims of centuries of either earthquakes or faith-based fascism need genuine help, not sermons and further interference from the political, theological or just plain old free-market chancers who hog the TV at such times. Rather as I buy insurance for myself and the family, I though the best way to do that was pick a safe cause (in my case Medicin sans Frontiers), put away some loot every month to them, then get on with the other business of life.
The thing that finally clinched it for me and MsF was a look at their website. I noted that while the more responsible governments around the British Isles have contributed, the Manx never have.
Knowing the awful track-record of the Manx Overseas Aid Committee (donating to evangelicals who stir up East European hate and promote homophobia in Africa, ‘family planning’ schemes by other religious bigots who ensure any country where condoms are distributed or abortion is legally available stays off the US AID help-list, etc. etc.) this is a good sign. You need bigots (or at least failed 1970’s marketing gurus) for friends to even make it onto the Manx list. Thankfully, MsF seem to have none of the above, so any money you give to them gets used helping the genuinely needy, regardless of their faith (or lack of it), gender, sexuality, or class.
And MsF don’t pussyfoot around respecting ‘cultural difference’ either. For example, when beardy bampots tried telling MsF not to give medical aid to lesser creatures, such as women or young girls, they were not only ignored on the ground at the time but slated around the world afterwards as dangerous nutjobs by MsF’s press office.
They’re the real thing, which is why my best birthday present this year (always excepting my daughter’s handmade card, of course) is knowing I could help them.

List of shame

I’ve just seen something incredibly useful in a Manx newspaper. It’s a list which, amongst the odd good cause which crept in by accident, probably contains every timewasting pseudo-charity whose useless antics you will ever be asked to perpetuate on the Isle of Man.
It got into print because Manx evangelicals live in such a tiny bubble that they think their lifestyles are praiseworthy, love to boast about them and actually think we might be impressed.
The list can be found at http://www.iomtoday.co.im/isle-of-man-business/AFD-Software-write-cheques-to.5902335.jp. But the use isn’t just limited to on-island readers.
If you go to http://www.charitycommission.gov.uk/index.asp then try some of the names you pick up what these charities do, what kind of income they can’t get away without declaring and who’s behind them, not the PR bumpf which gets printed uncut in the lazier press publications.
Then, if you check the trustees, you’ll find that by clicking on any name their trusteeships with other charities are given, so enabling you to see how such parasites network. The worst don’t admit most of their links, but, amusingly, the more arrogant and shameless ones do. You can also find links to their websites, which tend to be less guarded about links to sometimes quite vacuous or stomach-churning enterprises.
Go on, have a treat. Spend an hour or so following the links and get all the ammunition you’ll ever need to keep faith-based lunatics at bay when they beg in your area.

Overseas aid sponsors murder in Uganda

Having waited in vain to see if a major human rights story would be covered in the ‘serious press’ I guess I’ll have to draw your attention to it.
Briefly, a Bill introduced in Uganda’s parliament on October 14th means gays, and those ‘promoting homosexuality’, face life imprisonment, or in certain cases the death sentence.
A useful summary of the Bill by Amnesty International tells us:
‘The existing law, Section 140 of the Ugandan penal code, penalizes 'carnal knowledge of any person against the order of nature' with imprisonment of up to 14 years. This legacy of British colonialism was introduced to punish local practices of what the colonial powers deemed to be 'unnatural sex.' The laws stand as proof that same-sex sexual practices and gender diversity are, and always have been, part of Ugandan culture. The draft bill tabled today seeks to imprison anyone convicted of 'the offense of homosexuality' for life.
Paragraph 3 of the draft bill sets out provisions on what it names as 'aggravated homosexuality,' which will incur the death penalty, contradicting the global trend toward a moratorium on the use of the death penalty.
The final section of the bill provides for Uganda to nullify any of its international or regional commitments that it deems 'contradictory to the spirit and provisions enshrined in this Act.' As both the African Commission and the UN Human Rights Committee have held, a state cannot, through its domestic law, negate its international human rights obligations.’
A group of 17 international human rights groups put out a joint statement explaining and condemning the Bill. Read it at
http://www.amnesty.org.uk/news_details.asp?newsId=18454 and I guarantee you will be stunned at the contents. In brief, a country once praised throughout Africa for effectively tackling AIDS/HIV has turned into a hellhole where the country's political leadership, egged on by their Western chums, have turned gay-hunting into a national bloodsport.
Western evangelicals are the sole cause of that.
At their request, we cheerily put our pennies in collecting tins for cutesy charities running programmes in Uganda, under the sad delusion we are helping. No, what we are doing is subsidising Africa’s 21st century equivalent of German anti-semitism in the 1930’s. The language is the same, the tactics are the same, and the culprits are the same, i.e. Christian bigots and fraudsters with powerful political friends.
I’ve blogged about this matter before, for example at Quack Christian 'therapy' causing Ugandan bloodbath and later at Uganda and happy clappy fascism - the saga continues.
But what depresses me even more is that I didn’t even know about Amnesty’s statement until the saintly Nigerian humanist campaigner Leo Igwe posted it on a discussion forum in the hope someone would alert the UK press.
I’m not only depressed that the UK press didn’t pick it up, but that even though I’m an Amnesty member and subscribe to both their newsfeeds and those of another signatory, Human Rights Watch, neither told their UK supporters.
Do they think we weren’t interested? If so, that’s a pretty sad judgement on what passes for a human rights ‘movement’.
Come to think of it, as this state of affairs in Uganda has gone totally un-noticed by the Manx Overseas Aid Committee, who still hand public money to happy clappy fascist scum without a second thought, it’s a pretty sad judgement on a lot of people.

Of spooks and spookchasers

The Freedom to Fester PR hacks bigging up some of our bogus charities have been busy again, judging from http://www.energyfm.net/cms/news_story_70823.html .
This time it’s an update on attempts to innocently suggest our firefighters, and not evangelical nutters linked to US ‘megachurches’, have been ‘helping’ in Romania.
I’ve raised aspects of this phenomena before (see Chief Minister, international joke and Another day, another Christian attack on Africans for more on this particular case). Sadly, things have got worse.
While Manx ‘aid’ goes to Romanian nationalist politicians and a party descended from Second World War fascists, local Hungarian human rights outfits which offered some hope have died away, to be replaced by ‘help’ from Jobbrik, the new Hungarian fascist grouping. On TV while over there I saw a ‘protest’ of ethnic Hungarian-Romanians led by paramilitaries carrying arrow cross flags. Just what that part of the world needs –mirror image fascist groupings representing two ethnic traditions fighting it out in the streets while EU grants and international aid are getting creamed off to the US via evangelical charities and ‘universities’ which offer Mickey Mouse degrees.
But reading what I’d uncovered before on Oradea’s history, an interesting question arises.
You’ll note that close to Oradea a cold war concentration camp that ‘officially’ never existed has been taken over by the US military, who are officially not there either, and super-officially haven’t used it to torture Muslims extradited illegally from EU countries.
Now we know that the US military is infested with evangelical fundies, who regard modern wars as crusades against Islam. Logically then, the Baptist churches of Oradea (which, of course, do not owe their native members to a requirement that applicants for Samaritans Purse food parcels sign up to the local Baptist church, or that potential employees of US corporations join such churches rather than homegrown ones in order to demonstrate their moral values), must have a few US military personnel praying there in between waterboarding European Muslims who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
So, adherents to a strange religious cult which talks to a bloke who isn’t there, who are themselves not there (officially) in a church which ‘spontaneously’ began from a Christian denomination which was also never there until Western governments decided to ‘help rebuild’ a country with grant aid which 'only' (i.e. never) goes to redevelopment projects suggested by local people or run by local companies. Incidentally, wonder where the Muslims who aren't there either worship?
All in all, very confusing. Wouldn’t it be quicker for Tynwald to just send our charitable donation direct to to US megachurches.
That’s not to suggest that they end up there already, of course.

Bad business as usual

I had to wait for one ridiculous item in this week’s Examiner to go online at http://www.iomtoday.co.im/west-news/Businesses-throw-support-behind-Cathedral.5560752.jp, just to check it wasn’t a joke.
The headline says, ‘Businesses throw support behind Cathedral proposals’.
Oh really?
Well... ..... no. Actually they don’t – at least not any which can get by without public handouts and charity.
The clue comes in the revelation that:
“The 14-strong BAG boasts inside knowledge of the building, legal, finance, training, service, retail and catering trades as well as the police.”
You see, once you know that the Talbots not only run connect2charity but are part of the evangelical mafia which runs Stepford Central and the Police Advisory Group, that Mr Talbot’s professional services are most regularly used by churchy charities who can’t manage basic book-keeping or the minimal requirements of Manx charitable status, and that Mrs Talbot trains folk like nursing home staff most bases there are covered.
And I wouldn’t be too impressed either at the assurance that:
“These plans have been endorsed by the Cathedral Chapter, composed of the Bishop of Sodor and Man, Archdeacon and five Canons who represent churches across the Island.”
Why?
Just see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/Bishop-appoints-new-canons-and.5444950.jp or even Re-arranging the Titanic’s deckchairs if you want to know in more detail.
So, looks like a drain on the public purse (rather than business) as usual then, and from an ever more desperate and incestuous crowd of losers who beg from genuine businesses and working people.
Ho hum.

We're still exporting ignorance to Uganda

I blog about Manx evangelicals helping theofascist nutjobs screw up African lives until I’m sick of the subject.
Sadly I see from http://www.manx.net/default.asp?id=18&articleid=9050 they’re still doing it.
Most recently I posted on Southern Poverty Law Center’s work exposing the role US Christian charities are playing in a witch-hunting of Ugandan gays which has to be compared to the build-up of German anti-semitism in the 1930’s. See http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2009/06/17/anti-gay-conspiracy-theories-debunked-by-christian-professor/ for more, and be sure to follow up the links to Boxturtlebulletin.com.
As there’s now a major fundraising effort to bring a crocodile tears, fact free expo about Anne Frank to the island’s major centre of religious wrongheadedness I have to assume ‘irony’ isn’t a word Manx Christians understand any better than ‘humanity’ or ‘decency’.
I can only repeat, yet again, what I said the last time I posted on Ugandan human rights abuse funded by Western Christians, who prey on ignorance via the charity system to screw up young lives….
“That people on the Isle of Man still give money to evangelical ‘charities’ who stir up such hatred disgusts me. The sheer stupidity and cluelessness of Manx Christian charities always amuses friends and relatives in countries where they consolidate the island’s reputation as a third world backwater and major exporter of village idiocy. Our role in Uganda, though, is in a whole other league, and far more deadly.”
Still, at least there’s one advantage to catching this twaddle as ‘community news’ on Manxnet before it hits the local media. When it appears in the 'proper press' under another byline, we’ll know exactly which ‘Freedom To Fester’ goon planted it, and which journalists are too lazy to rewrite it.

Uganda and happy clappy fascism - the saga continues

I’ve blogged on here before about the effects of Christian ‘charity’ on Africa and Eastern Europe. I’ve accepted I may have to revisit the subject often until the Manx government, and in particular the Education Department, stops encouraging locals to underwrite racist, homophobic nonsense that starts wars, destroys lives, and enables Western churches to steal from the poor.
Southern Poverty Law Center is an honourable Martin Luther King era Alabama outfit that keeps an eye on all manner of bigots. They have an interesting piece on Scott Lively, the bonkers US evangelical setting up shop in Uganda along with equally weird characters. Even conservative US Christians are now warning against Lively, author of a ludicrous book, The Pink Swastika, which claims the Third Reich was a gay cult.
To their credit, they’re increasingly concerned too at the role US Christian charities are playing in a witch-hunting of Ugandan gays which eerily resembles the build-up of German anti-semitism in the 1930’s. See http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2009/06/17/anti-gay-conspiracy-theories-debunked-by-christian-professor/ for more, and be sure to follow up the links to Boxturtlebulletin.com.
That people on the Isle of Man still give money to evangelical ‘charities’ who stir up such hatred disgusts me. The cluelessness of Manx Christian charities always amuses friends and relatives in countries where they consolidate the island’s reputation as a third world backwater and major exporter of village idiocy. Our role in Uganda, though, is in a whole other league, and far more deadly.

From Third World to Romania, with ignorance

Watching the third and final part of the excellent BBC 2 series The Lost World of Communism last night, something occurred to me which really puts some Manx ‘Overseas Aid’ into perspective.
One of the topics in a reasonably (but not well) researched programme about Romania was Ceacescu’s appalling attitude to abortion, which was not only illegal but carried severe prison sentences for women who obtained them. Even fervent Romanian nationalists interviewed agreed this was wrong. Thus one of the earliest reforms was to liberalise the laws, and make legal the actions of doctors who had discreetly carried them out for years at great personal risk as a matter of conscience.
Compare this to the Isle of Man, where there has still never been a legal abortion even though the law now allows them. Only last year a Nobles consultant legally sanctioned to offer them said he has never had to perform one, which is frankly unbelievable in a community of 80,000.
From the experience of friends I also know that when routine tests are carried out for higher risk pregnant women close to the end of first trimester it is common that the results are ‘lost’ somewhere between here and Liverpool, and specialists are ‘unavailable’ for advice. Thus access to abortion is denied by bureaucratic sleight of hand.
Meanwhile evangelical charities run by people who have tried to keep this island in the dark ages have the gall to ask for funds to ‘help’ Romanians.
No wonder Romanians I speak to, quite rightly, regard us as a pathetic third world exporter of superstitious village idiots, creepily similar to the pair they shot in December 1989.

Jesus saves, Africans just die

Another planted story about ‘caring’ spookchasers (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/charity-news/Caring-Man-helps-Ugandan-children.4813295.jp) has me fuming at both the sheer audacity of these shysters and the absence of background checks before Manx overseas aid money is doled out.
The danger signs are there even before checking further. When did anyone at Broadway Baptists help another human unless there’s a kickback?
The first obvious question was ‘who the hell are Childcare Kitgum Servants’?
A fast answer to that, and to how they work, can be found at http://www.cks.org.au/projects_current.php. In brief, it’s an Australian evangelical outfit, which immediately raises the question of why they bother forming a subsidiary Manx charity.
I suspect the answer to that is the same one as the use of Manx charitable status by several US evangelical networks. Bargain basement alternative to proper Manx offshore status, with no searchable public records and a weak regulatory regime which files documents but does not check or monitor charities.
This allows money to be bounced around the world from one sister charity to another as ‘donations’. They will eventually reach the US bank account of an evangelical church, usually in tranches of under $10,000 to avoid triggering obligatory reports to the FBI and IRS, and always entering the US in another currency and then being converted into dollars to avoid new Patriot Act checks which can be made anywhere in the world if the suspicious transaction is in US dollars.
But it gets worse. Via an e-mail list I subscribe to I discovered http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/118125/?page=1, which really puts stuff in perspective. Rick Warren, the homophobic twat due to cast spells at the Obama inauguration, and a mad Ugandan pastor linked to the Bush regime’s massive sponsorship of faith-biased pseudo ‘AIDS prevention’ schemes. A disaster which makes the problem worse and allows western evangelicals to rob Africans of their overseas aid then ship the proceeds home again to build megachurches.
Then again, we should not forget the UK contribution to a scam which is sicker than graverobbing. The infamous ALPHA cult is also busy in Uganda. Their head honcho, Sandy Millar, (who famously told homophobic US Episcopalians that "your steadfastness in the face of a new and speciously sophisticated manifestation of evil has won you many admirers all over the world" ) started cuddling up to Archbishop Henry Orombi over there and was rewarded by being made a bishop of the Ugandan Church with a special mission to London.
Excuse my language, but Christ on a bike! These pondlife must be shovelling up cash by the bucketful while Africans die, and now the Isle of Man is helping them.
It really is time for vigorous public debate on both the abuse of Manx charitable status and the vacuous system by which our overseas aid budget is being hijacked.

To Uganda, with ignorance

The island’s efforts to export evangelical misery to Africa got an extra boost this week, though you wouldn’t know so from reading the Education Department’s press release at
http://www.gov.im/lib/news/education/schoolraisesfurt.xml
Yes, on the face of it looks like a worthy project, but to know what’s really going on you need to know who Abaana really are.
You can find that out at http://www.abaana.org/home/about.php.
Starting to get the picture?
A key point to note is this is a Northern Irish evangelical charity. These have a murky history not known to anyone who hasn’t studied the sectarian conflict, and in particular the Loyalist tradition of abusing public funds meant to heal sectarian division and rebuild communities.
Briefly, in the 1980’s any biblebasher in the North could get public funds by claiming to run a ‘peace and reconciliation’ project - so many did. Background checks were minimal, Westminster was working flat out to support anything which got Ulster unemployment down and inevitably Loyalist local government departments looked after their own first.
All they had to do was use the magic word ‘bridgebuilding’ and UK government and charity funds rolled in –staff wages, office equipment, even rent-free offices in purpose built small business centres. Evangelical churches got so used to it some of their congregations have never needed another job – even though they were the root of sectarian hate in the first place.
Then peace broke out so they had to look further afield, and the Isle of Man is perceived as an easy target.
You should also take a really close look at the role of evangelical churches in Uganda. For example, consider the growing problem of evangelicals who accuse small kids of witchcraft, bag small fortunes ‘curing’ them until the parents run out of cash, then slope off leaving the families to get driven out of the village or lynched.
But surely that doesn’t involve Western evangelicals, and certainly not Manx ones?
Yes, it does! Just a few years ago I interviewed a Peel pastor who had a nice little earner going over there. Once or twice a year he went over to ‘cast out spirits’, ‘cure’ AIDS….and split the profits with an African partner church. Even my highly religious editor was so embarrassed he wouldn’t run the rantings of this lunatic as a story.
You also need to know that the teacher who introduced this project to St. Ninians moonlights with Port St Mary Living Hope Community Church's infamous ‘youth ministry’. In fact she’s one of the little clique who enable their pastor to have open access to schools and even pupil records. And yes, this is the same pastor who was the subject of complaints for pestering girls in their early teens with text messages. See previous postings for more on that!
Will the Education Department ever stamp this crap out?
I doubt it. Not if the alternative to easy publicity for bogus charitable projects they know no-one will ever investigate involves real research, properly thought through policies or employing qualified professionals at the going rate.