The breath taking irony of her speech was her implied criticism of the Obama administration for waging what Palin sees as open ended and ill-defined wars, which kind of defines Bush’s Iraq War. Yet Palin praises Bush for making Osama’s death possible, “We thank President Bush for having made the right calls to set up this victory”, ignoring the fact he dragged the USA into 2 wars that had no exit strategies or clear cut missions. She further implies Obama is responsible for the lack of direction for the Iraq War::

There’s a lesson here then for the effective use of force, as opposed to sending our troops on missions that are ill-defined. And it can be argued that our involvement elsewhere, say in Libya, is an example of a lack of clarity. See, these are deadly serious questions that we must ask ourselves when we contemplate sending Americans into harm’s way. Our men and women in uniform deserve a clear understanding of U.S. positions on such a crucial decision. I believe our criteria before we send our young men and women—America’s finest—into harm’s way should be spelled out clearly when it comes to the use of our military force. I can tell you what I believe that criteria should be in five points.
…
Second, if we have to fight, we fight to win. To do that, we use overwhelming force. We only send our troops into war with the objective to defeat the enemy as quickly as possible. We do not stretch out our military with open-ended and ill-defined missions. Nation building is a nice idea in theory, but it is not the main purpose of our armed forces. We use our military to win wars.

And third, we must have clearly defined goals and objectives before sending troops into harm’s way. If you can’t explain the mission to the American people clearly and concisely, then our sons and daughters should not be sent into battle. Period.

I think this is a speech she should have given years ago to the Bush administration.

Sarah Palin – Proud holder of a life time membership card to Delusions R Us.

Now colour me a cynic, but I sniff more to this than many of the main stream news outlets are reporting. This is being chocked up to deep rooted bigotry and American fear of Islam. I see a man who spotted an opportunity to increase his paranoid flock numbers so he can have a bigger following idolizing his every utterance.

If Jones pulls this stunt off and the mosque is moved think of how much power he will have, how large his congregation will grow because people will view him as a hero. If he doesn’t succeed and the book burning goes ahead, he will give those in the US who are being held hostage by their fears, a way of venting their terror and again, his following grows. Win-win situation for him. Everyone else looses.

Terry Jones is not a hero, as some are saying, he’s a garden variety opportunist who runs a cult. Okay there, I’ve used the “c” word. There is even a Facebook page that supports him, which thankfully doesn’t have a lot of followers. If the looming image of a book burning doesn’t terrify you, then you need a reality check. These people are mistaking freedom of speech for hate mongering. I have no doubts Jones believes everything he is preaching. I have every faith in the fact he hates Muslims, gays, everyone who stands up to him… in short the world at large. His following hovers around 100 people, and is seizing the chance to increase it. People like this love nothing more than having people hang on their every word, trembling in fear at the impending apocalypse and coughing up hard earned money to the church to ensure their passage to heaven.

Jones was booted out of his previous church in Germany, about a year ago. He was pastor for the Christian Community of Cologne until sometime in 2009 when he was forced to leave under a cloud of accusations of dipping into the church funds and his extreme radicalism in regards to Islam. His own daughter speaks out against his behaviour:

Jones’ daughter, Emma Jones, who still lives in Germany, was one of those accusing her father and stepmother of wrongdoing. Emma Jones had broken with the church, calling it a “cult” that “forced us with oppression to be obedient.”

“They used mental violence. They’d say, ‘If you’re not obedient, God will punish you,’ ” Emma Jones told The Gainesville Sun. Other former church members in Florida and Germany also described Jones’ style as abusive and cult-like.

Terry Jones led a cult in Germany article.

Radio Deutsche Welle reports leaders of the Christian Community asked him to leave because the focus of his sermons was becoming more Terry Jones centric and less about being a good Christian. In short, he was pushing his own cult of personality agenda over teachings of Christ. How extreme did his preachings become? Check this out:

Jones became increasingly radical as the years went by, former associates say. At one point he wanted to help a homosexual member to “pray away his sins.” Later he began to increasingly target Islam in his sermons. A congregation member reported that some members were afraid to attend services because they expected to be attacked by Muslims.

Der Sterm reported local Cologne authorities sniffed around the church when he allegedly dabbled in faith healing. He was accused of trying to organise nurses to encourage ill patients to stop their medical treatment and rely on prayer instead.

German authorities investigated the church and Jones, as well, for it’s fund raising activities. He had his congregation collect furniture and sell it for a profit. On the surface, this sounds innocent, until you realise this is a tax exempt organisation running a business (one geared to make a profit) out of the shell of a not for profit church. To make matters worse, he was also accused of using church money for his own expenses. You can’t do that if you have tax-exempt status. At one point, the church’s tax status was suspended. It has since been reinstated, but there was enough of a cloud over this that disturbed the Cologne authorities enough to launch the investigation in the first place.

The German church does not talk about this shady past. They simply say it was a parting of the ways based on a disagreement over his style of leadership. There is a much darker story, one I’m sure they are tired of and want nothing more to do with.

Jones is doing the same thing in Florida. The Dove Church runs a used furniture store (they call it “vintage furniture”), has an Ebay store to flog the items, uses the free labour of the congregation to sell the items (at a profit). Local Florida authorities are said to be interested in whether ALL the money goes to the church or whether some of it is funneled elsewhere. There in lies the problem. If you run a not-for-profit organisation, you cannot keep any of the money. The store is being run from church property, using congregation for free labour and claiming the money raised is “used to support Christian Organizations such as the Lisa Jones House in Gainesville, Florida, which helps those in need with things like bread, clothing, food, and furniture.” When you find members of the Dove Church have to rely on the local food bank for food, you wonder just how much of the church’s 1.6 million dollar value is actually going to help anyone outside of Jones and his closed circle. This is what he was accused of doing in Germany. Let’s hear from Jone’s daughter said about this:

Emma Jones, who still lives in Cologne after breaking with her parents and the church, said TS and Company, which first was established in Germany in 2004 by Terry and Sylvia Jones, fed the private coffers of her father and stepmother in Cologne.

Emma Jones and Heinz Koop – a former church elder in Germany – say church members confronted Terry and Sylvia Jones with an itemized list of alleged abuses such as a car purchased by the church for their son, salaries paid by the church for TS and Company employees and donated furniture that was sold for profit.
Gainsville Sun newspaper – A look at the Dove World Outreach

There were also allegations Jones use minors to sell the furniture, with them working up to 12 hours a day in the furniture store. His current church is pretty much a closed book when it comes to the internal workings. The basic problem when looking into groups like this, is the fact fear plays a strong role in keeping people quiet. The fear of hell and damnation is a powerful motivator.

The story gets a bit muddled when you start looking into the church’s financial situation. On the one hand the church is tax-exempt, then it is claimed TS and Company pays taxes, but it uses church members for free labour and they use church property to work from. There is no clear division between church and business. What makes this all murkier is the home in Slidell, La., he purchased in January 2007 for $303,900 and a condo in Paradise Island Towers Condo on Treasure Island, Florida along with 6 other properties worth more than $650,000. Just how much money does the furniture business make during an economic downturn? This is a small church, and reportedly a small business but that’s a lot of cash floating around.

If you want to see deeper into Pastor Jone’s mind, look at the manual he distributes to the (few) students who attend the Dove academy. I don’t know about the rest of you, but before I send anyone off to study at an academy/school, I’d demand a modicum of literacy from those in charge. The rulebook is a rambling, occasionally incoherent and frightening look into the minds behind the church. I just love a manual that has a great big honking typo on the first page:

” The goal of the Academy is for each student to develop a stabile lifestyle of Discipline in order to become a strong apostolic Fife Fold Minister in our Apostolic Ministry System.”

I guess the good pastor’s computers don’t use spell check. Who needs stability when you have brimstone burning in your soul! I understand the odd typo or occasional mangled sentence. We all have brain dead moments. But seriously! This is supposed to be a manual distributed by school leaders!! Literacy and coherence is not optional. I’m not sure what the Fife Fold Minister is by the way. I suspect it’s a typo as well and should read Five Fold Minister, but given the ramblings coming out of this organisation, it could be a Fife. Anything in quotes is taken verbatim from the manual – the typos and grammatical errors are not mine.

Spell check can’t solve the problem with this next section:
“If for any reason a student missed receiving the homework, and failed the test the next day, this is not an excuse.”

Section 5 deals with food:
“Sweets, cake and things like that are not allowed” Ohhh… shucks cancel my membership. Give up my apple pie and chocolate cake? Only from my cold, dead hands. This explains a lot about Jones. I have a philosophy – there is nothing that can’t be made better by a cup of tea and chocolate cake.

“No eating out in restaurants” – it’s difficult to control a person’s thinking if they are exposed to the outside world.

“Students will be put on the scale once a week to follow the tendency. Each student received his weight goal, that must be reached, otherwise this category is failed”. This paragraph could be labeled “epic fail”. I keep wandering back to “the tendency”. Are you confused as well? Tendency to eat? Tendency to be human?

There is a section on cleanliness. Now I don’t object to making your students shower. I just can’t stop laughing at the way it’s put: “Mouth, sweat areas, hair, feet hands.” That’s the entire line. I’m assuming he meant it to be included in the section on having regular showers, but it just hangs there. “Sweat areas”? That is going into my list of amusing things to ponder when I’m stuck underground on the subway.

Now we move into the creepy domain dealing with section 6. Family and relationships.
“- During Academy you are not allowed to visit family members or friends, or receiving visits. This time is giving God and the student is supposed to spend all his time to study, practice and grow on order to become a true and faithful Minister.
- Family occasions like weddings, funerals or Birthdays are no exception to this rule.
- No phone calls. Exceptions can be made under certain circumstances but only after receiving permission.”
Total isolation from your support network – there’s that “c” word rearing it’s nasty head again.

I’m going to go to hell for this one but… “Singles are not allowed to have romantic relationships to the opposite sex.” Hmm does seems discriminatory – gays can have a relationship but … oh wait… I forgot… Dove Church hates gays too so I guess they assume there will be no gays there. Also Pastor Jones, if you read this, for the love of God it should read “Singles are not allowed to have romantic relationships” full stop. Or if you insist, “Singles are not allowed to have romantic relationships WITH the opposite sex.” Sorry, a grammatical breakdown moment there. It won’t happen again.

“In order to obey God, we have to leave the family behind! Jesus said: those who are doing the will of God are my family.” Again, isolation, the key component of all good cults. Mix this with a fire and brimstone condemnation of the world being at the “Gates of Hell”, hatred of any group that doesn’t meet with your approval and bingo. The Dove Church’s motto could be “bring me your fearful, your terrified. Bring me your tired and meek so that I may use them.”

The tenor of politics south of the border has created fertile ground for Jones and his ilk. What is sad, is the fact I’m not surprised by the call to burn books (whether it’s the Qur’an, Harry Potter or Peter Rabbit is irelevant). What truely saddens me is I am surprised this hasn’t happened sooner. When you have “news” channels such as Fox, mainstream politicians like Palin and the Teaparty screaming at the top of their lungs that it’s all the liberals’ fault for everything wrong in the world and we need to have a new revolution to put things back to right (read back to fundamentalist faith built in their own image), and calling for a new holy war to purge the nation of everything they fear, how can we be shocked when someone like Pastor Jones snatches his 15 minutes of fame away from them.

Nice con job Mr Jones. What stunt will you pull next to steal the spotlight?

You can read the manual a the Smoking Gun

____

Correction: When I did the original research for this article, Dove World Outreach membership was pegged at around 100 people. Since that time, estimates have been adjusted down to about 50 members.

“Royal Bank Canada is one of the planet’s greenest companies” according to one of its own brochures. Coporate Kanada saw fit to include RBC as one of the top 50 in a competition dubbed Canada’s Greenest Employers, which purports to recognize organizations that have created “a culture of environmental awareness.” Yet RBC is now the major financier of Alberta’s tar sands, one of the largest industrial projects in human history and perhaps the most destructive. The tar sands, now the cause of the second fastest rate of deforestation on the planet, are slated to expand several times its current size.

Dudes! I’d take your manifesto a wee bit more seriously if you hadn’t been caught on camera driving away in an SUV! Come one. If you are going to attack “Corporate Kanada” for it’s anti environmental activities, the least you could do is drive up to the site you are going to firebomb in a Smart Car. Seriously – an SUV? I hope it was at least a hybrid. Maybe you can contact the makers of Smart Cars and get them to sponsor you. Or better yet, ride up on a bicycle.  Now that’s environmentally conscientious!

What makes me think these nobs don’t see the irony of  using an SUV to strike in the name of environmentalism.

“what [Obama] should be doing is following the right things that Bush did.” (I’m working on figuring out what those things were. If I figure it out, I’ll let you know) …”We had no domestic attacks under Bush, …We’ve had one under Obama.”

Later he amended the statement by saying he had omitted to include the words “since 9/11″. Oh that makes it all right then! We’ll just forget about Richard Reid the shoe bomber shall we?

Former Bush press secretary, Dana Perino, said in November that the Clinton administration was to blame for the 9/11 attacks, which occurred  8 months after Clinton left office. I guess Bush should be forgiven for not having enough time to read the security alerts regarding Al Qaeda – the two syllable words must have stumped him. Bush was given a briefing a full month before 9/11 occurred, entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”, yet the Bush administration did nothing to stop the attacks. It came out later that, despite growing concerns and warnings from the intelligence community in the US, the Bush administration didn’t follow up the warnings, nor did any of Bush’s advisors try to discuss the issue with the President again. Despite the overwhelming evidence that a terrorist attack did occur on US soil under the Bush administration, in November, after the Fort Hood attack, Perino said “We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during Bush’s term”.

Are these people memory impaired? Or are they laying the groundwork for the next election by reworking history? Not a group to let facts stymie them for long, they simply prevaricate (if you are a Bush/Palin fan, you might want to buy a d-i-c-t-i-o-n-a-r-y). If you repeat the lie enough, you begin to believe it. As will large numbers of voters. In rehabilitating George Bush’s reputation, they are making it easier for Palin (or any other far right candidate) to establish the moral high ground for any future elections. What’s next? Burning all the footage of 9/11 and all books that mention it?

With the hardline extremist group Al Shabab gaining so much control of Somalia, I think I’ll leave this country off my “must see list”

Nice to see American ideals of right and wrong creeping back into the political arena.

Waterboard for charity