Archive for December, 2006

Merry Xmas!

jesus friend

This is the front page image of My Friend, “the Catholic magazine for kids”. There have been no complaints. Yet.

(Spotted by The Pagan Prattle)




Irving released

David Irving, the revisionist historian who was jailed in Austria last year on “holocaust denial” charges, has been released. The pudgy peddlar of porkies had served 13 months in a Vienna jail.

Better out than in. As Ben Macintyre puts it in The Times:

It is far better that Irving should be at liberty to spout his vile nonsense, and derided for it. Let him traipse back to Britain, demanding an academic boycott of Austria and Germany, which everyone will ignore. Then his ideas can slide back into the intellectual mud where they belong. We need to hear the poisonous ideas to realise how wrong they are.

It is hard to make fun of people properly if they are banged up in a cell.




TWAC USA – Black Christmas

A remake of a 1974 horror film, Black Christmas, is creating a stir among pro-Christmas forces in the USA. The hero of this “stalk and slash” thriller is an eye-gouging psycho who terrorises a gaggle of sorority girls.

Jennifer Giroux, the co-founder of Operation Just Say Merry Christmas, is similarly terrorised by the evil this film represents:

The use of religious music ‘Silent Night’ and the nativity set on the front porch in one scene are insensitive to Christians. It’s not enough to ignore and omit Christmas, but now it has to be offended, insulted and desecrated. Our most sacred holiday, actually a holy day, is being assaulted.

It is, apparently, a very bad film. But at least it’s annoying Jennifer.




Idomeneo passes without incident

mohead
The Deutsche Oper in Berlin last night showed the controversial production of Mozart’s Idomeneo which features the severed heads of Jesus, Mohammed, and Buddha in the final scene.

The opera had previously been cancelled for fear of offending over-sensitive types, who it was thought might have reacted with bloody violence to the portrayal of their 7th century hero sans corps. But, whether due to religious indifference or to the massive security operation which involved airport-style checks and plain-clothes police, the show passed peacefully.

The Times reports, however, that the leading tenor “appeared to be wearing a bulletproof vest”.




C4 xmas message drop out

The Telegraph reports that Khadija Ravat has decided not to front the alternative Channel 4 xmas message after all (see below). Sources cite pressure from “senior members of the community” who thought it was not her place to speak for Islam, and also threatening letters from non-Muslims who thought she was trying to “upstage the queen”.

Channel 4 is currently searching for another niqab to front the show.




The Archers civil partnership attacked

stephen green
Pink News carries a quote from the nation’s most prominent Christian bigot about tonight’s dramatised civil partnership on The Archers.

The radio soap features two characters, Adam and Ian, in a long-running gay partnership who are officially tying the knot in this evening’s episode. Stephen Green, the National Director of Stephen Green’s Voice (formerly Christian Voice), described the storyline as “nauseating”.

Personally, seeing a picture of actors Andrew Wincott and Stephen Kennedy dressed up in wedding suits holding their glasses of fizz made me feel quite queasy. It brought home the enormity of the nauseating pretence and perversion of a real wedding which every ‘civil partnership’ is.

My hope is that the remaining faithful listeners of ‘The Archers’, those who have endured the plaintive politically-correct story-lines of the last few years will at last wake up and find something less grating to listen to.

MWW’s advice to people such as Green who are nauseated by the thought of gay sex: don’t think about it so much. Jesus Christ, that man is positively obsessed!




Xmas Caption Competition

capcomp
The cover of December’s Freethinker is graced with this wonderful photograph – the subject of its Xmas caption competition. We thought MWW readers, witty buggers that they are, might like to have a crack at winning the prize, so we asked editor Barry Duke for permission to post it here, and he kindly agreed.

1st prize – a copy of I Think the Nurses are Stealing my Clothes: The Very Best of Linda Smith, a compilation of the late comedian’s funniest quotes.
2 runners up prizes – a year’s subscription to The Freethinker

Deadline for entries is Jan 15, 2007. Send yours to
Freethinker Caption Contest
PO Box 234,
Brighton
BN1 4XD

Or email them to FTeditor(AT)aol.com

You might as well post them in the comments here too.




TWAC – pro-Xmas forces score victory over secularist BBC

The BBC is to drop an “offensive” song from its Christmas TV trailer after church leaders complained the music was Satanic. UPDATE – see it on YouTube. (Thanks, Nick)

The song, Spinal Tap’s spoof “Christmas With the Devil”, accompanies the 30-second clip which focuses on the baddies in upcoming BBC dramas. Here are the lyrics:

The elves are dressed in leather
And the angels are in chains
(Christmas with the Devil)
The sugar plums are rancid
And the stockings are in flames
(Christmas with the Devil)
There’s a demon in my belly
And a gremlin in my brain
There’s someone up the chimney hole
And Satan is his name
The rats ate all the presents
And the reindeer ran away
(Christmas with the Devil)
There’ll be no Father Christmas
‘Cause it’s Evils holiday
(Christmas with the Devil)
No bells in Hell
No snow below-
Silent Night, Violent Night
So come all ye unfaithful
Don’t be left out in the cold
You don’t need no invitation, no…
Your ticket is your soul

According to a BBC spokesman, this was “meant to be fun”. But war isn’t fun, and Canon Peter Howell-Jones takes the War Against Christmas very seriously:

It’s in very bad taste. I’ve enough to do without having to defend God from things like this.

Bless.

UPDATE: The Canon claims he was misquoted. While he maintains the song was “not the best choice of song for a Christmas link”, it is not something he is getting “all hot and bothered over”. Looks like The Sun is stoking the yuletide fire on this one.




TWAC – latest from the frontline

The Daily Mail reports from the frontline of The War Against Christmas with a story about how Xmas cards “are losing their religious message”.

It’s probably the result of an alliance between the Militant Secularist forces and that ill-disciplined ragtag band of guerillas, the Illiberal Atheists. Somehow they have managed to infiltrate the creative departments of card companies and reduced the incidence of religious imagery in this year’s xmas cards to a paltry 1 in 100.

Some have even subverted the traditional iconography. For example, one card depicts three plasticine shepherds smoking what the Mail coyly describes as a “roll-up” while trumpeting angels hover overhead. One shepherd is saying “I don’t know about you guys, but this sheep s*** is really doing my head in.”

Who better to go to for an outraged quote than Stephen “Dog Shit” Green of Chri… no, wait, let’s stop legitimising his presumptious claim to speak for all Christians and call his organisation what it is: Stephen Green’s Voice. Stephen Green, the Greenian in charge of the fundamentalist campaign group Stephen Green’s Voice, told the Daily Mail:

“It seems that those who design and manufacturer Christmas cards have forgotten its true meaning.

It is very sad and the fact that so many cards barely allude to Christmas is very disquieting.

The card that suggests the shepherds had been smoking strange substances is not just unfunny, it is also deeply offensive.

Presumably he thinks it’s deeply offensive because it suggests – horror of horrors – that an angel did not really appear to shepherds to herald the birth of god on earth. Don’t laugh!




Countering prudo-fascism

John Beyer, the smut campaigner of Mediawatch-UK, wants to imprison people who look at pornography. He has a petition on the Downing Street e-petition site which has gathered over 200 sigs in the past couple of days:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to steadfastly proceed with plans announced in the Queen’s Speech to make possession of extreme pornography illegal and to include a much wider range of pornographic imagery, such as R18 material, within the scope of the Criminal Justice Bill.

The extreme pornography law will make it illegal for adults to look at pictures of consenting adults pretending to hurt each other. It is a knee-jerk law, with no basis in research, which will criminalise a large section of the population.

Whatever you think of violent pornography, this law is stupid, unnecessary, and dangerous. To counterbalance Beyer and his prudo-fascists, please sign this petition (if you are a British citizen):

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Abandon plans to make it a criminal offence to possess ‘violent pornography’

This proposed law would create a Thought Crime making it illegal to possess “sexual images” that, in the subjective opinion of members of the Home Office, show activities “liable to cause serious injury or death” even if the participants were consenting adult actors.

For more information and links, see The Melon Farmers.

The proposed law was largely in reaction to campaign by the mother of a woman who died at the hands of Graham Coutts. His conviction for murder was quashed on 19 October this year.