They're at it again folks! The same wicked people who told you that Britain was infested with baby-eating Satanists are now tricking tabloid journalists into indoctrinating you with the idea that it was the New Age which caused the death of 6 Million Jews, not Hitler. According to a new posse of narrow-minded religious bigots the New Age Movement cultivates homicidal serial killers and 'eco-Fascists' who are supposed to be conspiring to overthrow all notion of Godliness in order to assist Satan to wreak his deadly havoc in Britain. Despite the fact that Hitler died 30 years before the term New Age was coined and that part of New Age teaching lauds the Jewish Mystery Tradition (The Kabbalah) these preposterous new allegations are being given credence yet again. Such august newspapers as The Glasgow Herald as well as many news-hungry national and local weeklies have swallowed Fundamentalist Scare Number 2. New Age Satanism rampant in U.K. Can British journalists be so dim? You betcha!To cloud the public's analytical capacity to discern the truth the fundamentalist agitators use alarmist tactics to incite emotional hatred aimed at what they see as the 'competition'. This serves to crock the opposition AND avoid embarrassing questions about the fundamentalist's own contribution to the depravity of our society. Lets face it, after 2,000 years of Christian dominance it becomes apparent that any evil occurring in Western society must be caused by, or have a direct relationship with, the culture that controls it! Nowhere was this propagandist slight-of-hand more ably illustrated than during the Satanic Child Abuse Scare where lunatic Christians claimed that hundreds of Satanists were supposedly sexually abusing, murdering and eating thousands of children every year in Britain. Four years on, and despite a nationwide witch-hunt, there has not been one successful prosecution related to so-called Satanic Abuse of children. Not one! Yet during the same period that Christians were blaming Satanists for abusing childre n, OVER TWO HUNDRED members of the clergy were convicted of perpetrating child abuse. Some in crimes so horrible that it made the Satanic allegations look positively mild. These 200 prosecutions wereincontrovertible evidence of Christian Ritual Abuse, yet they were ignored. (See report: The Black Museum of Child Abuse, July 1991)Whilst gutter press hacks were scavenging the country seeking (and failing) to obtain proof of Satanic Abuse, HUNDREDS of children were being constantly and systematically abused by members of the sect which had invented and promoted the idea of Satanic Abuse. Not once did any journalist who pursued the Satan Myth consider the comparison valid and because of their ingrained cultural prejudices, British Parents were not warned that a scandal of horrendous proportions was occurring repeatedly and continually within churches throughout this country. The Black Museum of Child Abuse showed that there is on average two serious cases EACH AND EVERY WEEK of children being horribly sexu ally abused by Clergymen who have the trust of parents and children. And those are just the cases which have been brought to court! How many more long-term abuses are going undiscovered because Social Workers, do-gooders and the police are sent on wild goose chases by the inept moral self-righteousness of the British Media? The Parents have a right to know, but all they see and read about is wild, unproven allegations about so called Satanic Abuse. "THOSE WHO DO NOT REMEMBER THE MISTAKES OF THE PAST ARE COMPELLED TO REPEAT THEM IN THE FUTURE" The disgusting hi-jacking of Jewish dignity by the despicable article RETURN TO THE CLIMATE OF THE HOLOCAUST (Glasgow Herald 6.3.92) is a typical response from ignorant press-men. New Age Bashing is the next step in the campaign by Christian Evangelicals to train the British public into becoming more and more xenophobic. Little by little they are succeeding in awakening old fears, breaking up our pluralist cosmopolitan societ y and replacing it with an intolerance which devalues any form of self expression or religious freedom. Each of these moral panics rides bouyant upon dilemas of the human condition which no sympathetic person can ignore. But in the process of lending them our moral support, we simultaneously allow these groups to capture power and influence to interfere with our human rights and freedom of expression. Often it is this very back-door method of obtaining a platform which is uppermost in the minds of the activists. These people have a hidden agenda of intolerance which is extremely subversive and pernicious. In just such subtle and hidden ways our society is being changed rapidly by the state within a state of Christian extremism. To their ultimate shame the media of this country have aided and abetted these gambits with the type of journalistic irresponsibility which fueled the spurious Satanic Ritual Abuse Myth. The reason is easy to fathom. Those hacks who are not simply hypocrites are an integral part of the Christian Cultural Prejudice which controls our society. Those who aren't chronically cynical are unconscious of their deeds. They often don't know just how prejudiced they are against religious minorities and alternative cultures. Just like many ordinary people in the 1950s were unconscious of their subconscious racism until they were educated to see it. In the infamous Glasgow Herald series of articles, Anne Johnstone produces yet another bundle of sectarian lies couched in alarmist diatribe. The appalling standard of professionalism is well illustrated by the fact that, in a piece dealing with supposed New Age victimisation of Jews the very people she DID NOT consult were Jews and New Agers. She based 90% of her report on the opinions of Christian evangelists and extracts from books by Christian fundamentalists. She wrote:"The New Age has its roots in the Theosophical Society ..which propounded a pot-pourri of paganism and Easter mysticism spiced with anti-Semitism. The adoption of these vie ws by the Nazis created the climate for theHolocaust...." "The terrifying consequences of redefining evil could be the justification of atrocities and the return of the Nazi mentality" ( Glasgow Herald 6.3.92). These are dangerous and gratuitous lies which we shall not allow to succeed. It is an insult to those Jews who survived the concentration camps to suggest that they do not know what caused the evil to which they were subjected. It is an arrogance for someone like Anne Johnstone to proffer a solution to a Jewish problem based upon a purely Christian perspective. We don't know what the editor of the Glasgow Herald was thinking of when he allowed this tripe, but it certainly wasn't the best interests of his Jewish readers. Simon Wiesenthal perhaps knows a little more about this subject than Ms Johstone? He wrote: "SS guards were portrayed after the war in a way that in reality described only a few of them - perverted beasts always with a whip in their shaft boots ready to strike the face of any prisoner crossing their path. Such warders certainly existed and they created the image of the concentration camp guard in the minds of both the inmates and the public. Yet these sadists accounted for no more than 10 per cent of the camp staff. The remaining 90 per cent were average people, remarkable only for their extreme insensitivity which might have been congenital or might have been acquired in the camps as a kind of psychological self-defence. These people committed crimes only under the exceptional conditions of the Third Reich ... Once the nightmare was over, once they had taken off their uniforms, they put aside their crimes with it and, for the world around them, reverted to what they had been before the war; totally unremarkable. If someone who knew them heard that they had whipped women and children in a concentration camp he would think it just as unlikely as that he himself might commit such atrocities. WE DO NOT LIKE PEOPLE CAPABLE OF SUCH CRIMES TO BE INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM O URSELVES " (Justice Not Vengeance pp 151). It was one of Wiesenthal's major fears that when survivors of the Holocaust expire, the true lesson to be learned from that period would be hi-jacked by people who simply do not know what they are talking about and the sacrifice of an estimated 6 million jews will have been for nothing. He believed that, unless we learn to put blame where it is due (with the weaknesses of ordinary people who selfishly depricate anyone else's beliefs putting self-interest before the human rights of others) humanity is doomed to suffer the same persecutions again and again. With Johnstone article in the Glasgow Herald, Weisenthal's fears have been shown to be justified. SO WHOSE JEWISH? Let's make one thing clear before we go any further. I'm not Jewish and the S.A.F.F. is not a Jewish organisation. Neither does it receive funding from the Jewish community. The S.A.F.F. seeks to combat ALL prejudice wherever and whenever it occurs. We comment because we are the only organisa tion in the world to have studied this problem over many years and that gives us the ability to short-circuit the ignorance which causes victimisation in the human psyche. The S.A.F.F. has no political allegiances. We seek only harmony through right knowledge. The upshot is so obvious it is screaming at you. Anyone who is capable of shooting a Jewish child point-blank in the face with a pistol or impaling babies on bayonets will graduate to shooting anyone and everyone else in due course. As Anne Johnstone very well knows, there is no connection between the New Age and Nazism. Hitler was born a Christian and there is ample evidence to show that the Roman Catholic church aided harboured and abetted many Nazi war criminals during and after WWII. Only last month secret Brazilian files exposed the fact that the Vatican, and the Red Cross helped some of Hitlers' worst henchmen escape prosecution after the war, including Joseph Mengele the 'Auschwitz Angel'. The Sunday Express reported during Janu ary (12.1.92) that the Catholic clergy kept one of the most wanted Nazi war criminals from justice for more than 40 years hiding him in a priory in Nice. The church's embarrassing war-time deals with Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin have still not been lived down. Whilst quickly recognising most newly independent Russian states the Catholic church has since 1948 refused to recognise Israel as an autonomous state. The Catholic church has openly blamed the Jews for the crucifixion. "THE CRUCIFIXION: ....although Pilate intended to have Jesus freed after the scourging, faced with the threats from the Jewish leaders, however, Pilate handed Jesus over to them to be crucified." (Virtue's Catholic Encyclopaedia" pp291. Observers conclude that it is this dichotomy more than anything else which causes anti-semitism in the Western World. Christian children are indoctrinated with the fact that Christ was all that is good and that the Jews horribly and unmercifully murdered him. For the Glasgow Herald to su ggest that a re-awakened interest in Odinnic & Celtic religions is likely to spark off another Holocaust is a contemptible slur which flies against all the facts. There is nothing more historically repetitive than fundamentalists setting one minority belief fighting against another in order to pick up the pieces afterwards. It was the Christians who blamed the Jews for murdering Christian children in the 12th century. This directly lead to the 12 century massacre of Jews at Clifford's Tower in York and thence to the expulsion of the entire Jewish population from 'Christian' Britain. CREEPING ANTI-SEMITISM: These are just a few of the historical illustrations which disprove the lie which fundamentalists would like to hoist into position about the New Age, but we don't have to rely upon historical fact, nor do we seek 'interpretative' opinions from sectarian 'experts' as Johstone did. We have modern proof that it is not the New Age which threatens the Jewish culture but fundamentalism itself. Many Christ ian fundamentalists are rabidly anti-semitic as we shall show, and these weak attempts to project anti-fascist hate towards harmless New Age people who are by qualification always towards the centre-left of the political spectrum, will only serve to provide a blind behind which REAL fascists can continue their anti-semitic activities unhinderedSurely Anne Johstone does not want that to happen? Then she should apologise forthwith and the Glasgow Herald must withdraw their accusations immediately.In the interests of justice and truth we demand that they do so and history will record the integrity of their response. FUNDAMENTALIST FASCISM: How many have noticed that Bible Belt America also co-incides with the most active Ku Klux Klan chapters? Or that the Church of Jesus Christ Christian Aryan Nations is just one of many para-military White Supremacist groups with highly anti-Zionist perspectives. The CJCCAN were recently busted by the FBI for arms stockpiling, committing robberies to finance terrorism, the planning of assassinations of federal officials, politicians and important Jews. Amongst those on the assassination list were Kissinger, Rockefeller, and Normal Lear. Citing a conspiracy by Zionists to control the U.S.A. as justification for their actions these fascists termed Jewish leaders "satanic and anti-christ leaders". During 1988 the Jewish Anti Defamation League of New York published a report on Klan and Nazi groupings in the U.S.A.: "Traditional hate groups such as the Klan and the Neo-Nazis who for many, many years were competitive, in the last dozen years have begun to meld together and merge in common cause to set up new organisations such as the Order of the Aryan Nations:" (AP. 2 November 1988) During September 1991 David Duke, ex Nazi and past Imperial Wizard of the KKK made his bid for governorship of Louisiana after gaining more than half the white votes in his senatorial campaign. Duke declares himself to be a Born Again Christian and admits to having d escribed Joseph Mengele the Angel of Auschwitz as 'a genius'. "One of Duke's most important supporters was the head of the state's Christian Coalition lead by television evangelist Pat Robertson" (Searchlight December 1991). No New Agers here eh Ms Johstone?THE BATTLE FOR JEWISH SOULS: In March 1991 The glossy Christian magazine ALPHA published a snide piece about the Jewish reaction to the growing number of 'Messianic Jews' groups. A Messianic Jew is a missionary euphemism for a converted Jew who becomes Christian but who pretends to be part of the Jewish culture so he/she can poach more converts. A number of Jewish leaders and groups had become unsettled by poaching of Jews under stress by Christian groups. Alpha's report made it sound as though the Jewish community was being reactionary, but was it? On May 5 1990 Two Christian missionaries disguised themselves as Chasidim priests and distributed conversion leaflets about Christ as the Messiah. This was just one part of a continuous missi onary campaign by Christians [not New Agers Ms Johstone!] to convert Jews to Christianity. (Jewish Chronicle 5.5.90)On November 2 1990 The Jewish Chronicle reported the rescue by a Rabbi of two immigrant Jews who were on the verge of being baptised by the group Christian Witness for Israel. According to Rabbi Arkush a group of Hebrew speaking Christian missionaries were being trained in Britain to target Israeli expatriates. There were claims that converted jews were obtaining jewish addresses from jewish organisations for Christian mailing purposes. During June 1991 Messianic Jews (Jews who had become Christians remember) targeted the large Leeds Jewish community advertising a concert by the Liberated Wailing Wall group. Investigations showed that group to have 'direct links to the San Fransisco based Jews for Jesus evangelistic organisation' During August 1991 the Jewish Gazette reported that Christian Missionaries are working amongst Soviet Jews and distributing literature outside the Israeli Embassy in Moscow and that many Jews had been issued with New Testaments. During December 1991 The Christian evangelist magazine The Vineyard proclaimed that its 'outreach' in Israel was currently then reaching 2,000 Jewish homes and that it was their hope that ' many will come to the knowledge of the truth in Christ Jesus'. During 1992 the American funded organisation Jews for Jesus announced it would open an Office in Britain. Other organisations set up to convert Jews to Christianity include Churches Ministry Among the Jews (CMJ). In March 1992 The Jewish Telegraph reported that Christian missionaries were 'currently calling at local Jewish homes'. Later that month it was reported that an American Christian evangelical group was attempting to finance a five million dollar settlement in Israel for Jewish immigrants from Russia. On 13 March 1992 the Jewish Telegraph reported that the plan was not as benign as it might at first seem and revealed that one of the Converted Christians had approached T he Soviet Jewry Committee with the idea as long ago as 1981. When asked at that time whether his aim was to convert Jewish emigres to Christianity he is reported as saying "We don't use that term. We talk rather in terms of 'completing'.". In response to such overt missionising Jewish religious leaders listed three Christian evangelical groups which they believed to be subversive to the Jewish community and it was this list which the Christian magazine Alpha took exception to. A half-page article in March 1991 well illustrates the point we have already made about inverting the crimes and projecting them onto the victim. The quote, by the Christian Jew Foundation, said: "They (the Jews) have got away with this for years. I have had filth, abuse and threats and promises of physical violence'. "Where's the New Age threat in all this Ms Johnstone? Why didn't your researches unearth the ongoing Christian campaign to convert the entire Jewish community? In comparison with what we have liste d, just the tip of he iceberg I'm afraid, Johnstone's anecdotal 'evidence' that the New Age poses a 'threat' to Jews is ludicrous, but has she unwittingly aided and abetted the very fundamentalist missionaries who are trying every which way to infiltrate, the Jewish community and exacerbate its divides and insecurities? Would it not be very possible that the reason why so many fundamentalist Christians are so occupied with the future of Judaism is that they are attempting to control and direct it towards THEIR biblical view of how it should develop? Is it not quite probably the case that in order to 'pen' the Jews into the Messianic mind-set which the fundamentalists have set for them, the 'frightener' of 'New Age Nazism' is the big stick which will enable them to do it whilst defeating yet another valid alternative belief set in the process? Well dear reader, uninformed Anne Johnstone, who didn't speak to any New Agers and who didn't speak to any Jews before penning her inciting article, also didn't speak to anyone from the Church of England, even though she appointed herself the guardian of Christianity with her:"I decided to write this piece because a number of Christians have told me they believe that New Age ideas are fast eradicating Judeo-Christian belief and that the Church is doing little to stop it.""Is this true?" Johstone asks herself, then proceeds to exclude those who can answer the question for her, including the Archbishop of Canterbury who has specifically condemned Christian groups which seek to convert Jews and who has supported Interfaith co-operation and dialogue. So if Johnstone has not been speaking to the Established church then just who has she been speaking to and why did she feel so confident in publishing an article with such sweeping, uncorroborated allegations and generalisations? More to the point, what were the motives of the editor of the Glasgow Herald in entertain this piece of gibberish in the first place? During January 1992 ALPHA magazine (produced by Christian evangelists for Christian evangelists) carried an advertisement for the International Messianic Jewish (Hebrew Christian) Alliance which claimed to be 'Uniting and serving Jewish Believers' This registered charity aims to 'respond by encouraging, helping and teaching our fellow Messianic Jews through national Alliances and through our international network'. Remember that'international network' folks!The bulk of the anecdotal testimony in Johstone's article comes from one John Drane who is supposed to be a New Age expert but whose comments so far make him anything but. He is a committed evangelical Christian and recently travelled to California to run an Outreach to New Agers. (see how they play both ends from the middle?) Not only is he peddling alarmist propaganda against the New Age in the U.K. but he travels to America to lead an anti-New Age Christian evangelical group there. It was totally unethical of the editor of the Glasgow Herald to print this biased, inaccurate, misleading and inc iting garbage without corroborative evidence. Here we have the exact same set of circumstances as when the Satanic Ritual Abuse Myth began. Fundamentalists with one big opening shot in an influential newspaper, used fundamentalist aligned doctors and psychologists to pursue the matter 'professionally' and provided claimed Satanic defectors for the press to interview. The press never bothered to ask real satanists what they did and did not do and so one of the biggest lies of this century was born. With the Satanic Abuse Myth it was Community Care which took Maureen Davies' exaggerations and misinterpretations at face value, distributing them to social workers who swallowed them so well that the article influenced the origins of the stupendously mismanaged Rochdale Satanic Abuse Case. Community Care have still not apologised to their readers for that inaccurate and misleading original article and Maureen Davies is still attempting to influence Christian social workers under the guise of her religious trust The Beacon Foundation. Today it is the Glasgow Herald which publishes dire warnings to the populace about dangers which don't exist, based upon third hand anecdotal testimony by sectarian 'experts' who display every ignorance and bias possible. A Rose may be a rose after any other name, but there are Christians and there are Christians. The vast majority of Christians are just like the vast majority of everyone else, good people trying to live their lives in harmony with others. We are not anti-Christian and have many Christian members of the S.A.F.F. Nevertheless the fact remains that not all Christians are nice people. Some have very dubious hidden agendas. It is naivity of the highest order for ordinary Christians to sit back and rely upon ephemeral religious doctrine to curb the excesses of self-righteous Christian activists who have been proven to harbour hidden agendas which are upsetting whole sections of our society. We can't sort their religion out for them; they should do it themselves and they will only be able to begin when they realise that orthodox Christianity is being taken over by ambitious extremists who seek to eradicate all other beliefs and the live-and-let-live approach which many regular Christians espouse.For example, the special edition of the glossy bi-monthly fundamentalist inspired Restoration Church magazine entitled TRUTH ABOUT ISRAEL contained articles which weren't so friendly to Judaism : "ISRAEL LAST BASTION OF APARTHEID? ..Zionism does NOT reflect the ideal of God's law." it said. "WHO ARE THE PEOPLE OF GOD? - Contrary to popular teaching the Jews are not the people of God. The redeemed community constitutes the new 'Israel of God' that supercedes national Israel in God's purpose" It went on. "THE HOPE OF ISRAEL": Many jews will believe before the coming of Jesus Christ but there will be no second opportunity for Jews to be saved after then." Yes, Ms Johnstone, it seems that if the Jews have anything to fear it is not from New Agers whos e live-and-let-live philosophy is a far cry from your description of their intents. It was not New Agers who wrote: "Although God loves the Jews their rejection of Christ means they have forfeited any rights to being included as God's people" It was a pious Christian spokesman (pp11 Restoration May/June 1991). It was not New Agers but Christians who wrote: "It is a mistake for Christians to exalt Israelis to the position of God's Chosen people'." (pp18. Restoration May/June 1991)I hope you are listening Ms Anne Johnstone and are beginning to realise what you have done with your ill-considered article? It is not New Agers but Christians who write in fundamentalist magazines:"The sheer fact of the Holocaust, Israel's trials and tribulations over the centuries and her current problems concerning unemployment, housing, falling economy..all add up to the same thing; that, having rejected Jesus as Messiah, the race as a whole has forfeited God's blessing and is now outside his purposes and protection. " (Prophecy Today pp10). Apparently Christian Gary Clayton does not agree with Anne Johstone's insufferable theory that the New Age caused the Holocaust . Clayton thinks that God visited the Holocaust on Jews because they weren't Christians. This bit of divine rationalisation should send a shiver through the spines of anyone who can see where this type of justification might lead. No Ms Johnstone, New Age people don't do or say any of these things. They are not fascists and they are not anti-semitic. They simply seek to live in peace and harmony with Jew and Christian alike. There is nothing in New Age philosophy which is remotely anti-semitic. THE REAL THREAT TO THE JEWS: One of the most amazing things about Johstone's article is that in so obstinately linking the New Age with Fascism she completely ignores the real wave of fascism now sweeping Europe. Neo-Nazi groups abound in France and Germany and racist and anti-semitic attacks are occurring daily. All this is well-documented yet the re has been little other than cosmetic attempts by the German and French governments to stamp out demonstrations, riots and attacks on foreigners. It is reported, for instance, that the majority of policemen in France are members of the Nationalist Party and sport their insignia clearly on their uniforms when on duty. On 16 October 1991 Lady Birdwood was found guilty at the Old Bailey of distributing propaganda leaflets which claimed that Jews 'ritually sacrificed' Christian children. The comparison of this allegation in relation to the then ongoing hysteria surrounding completely unfounded allegations of Satanic Ritual Abuse by Christian fundamentalists was lost on our tunnel-vision media who continued to print uncorroborated allegations of Satanic Abuse as though fact whilst agreeing among themselves that it would be immoral to give Birdwood 's theories space because there was no proof that Jews sacrificed Christian children. Within a month another batch of similar leaflets were distributed within Camb ridge and Oxford Colleges which 'resurrected medieval claims of Jewish ritual murder of Christian children.'On 9 March 1992 it was reported that the 'Black Legion', a Neo Nazis splinter group made up of soldiers from the old East German battalions, had escalated the civil war in Yugoslavia by breaching the U.N. peace initiative. Reporters claimed that they intended to wipe out the Serbians because they were 'sub-human'. (Daily Express 98.3.92) No New Agers here Ms Johstone! Why wasn't the REAL threat to Jews worthy of a two part double page serial in the Glasgow Herald? THE TRUTH ABOUT THE NEW AGE: WHAT IT IS, WHAT IT MEANS WHAT THEY DO. To see just how incorrect was the picture that was being painted, The editor of the Glasgow Hearld only had to refer to a detailed census of the New Age carried out in 1989 which proved what all New Agers know to be the case, that the vast majority of New Age people are liberal to left wing and ANTI-FASCIST. Most were pacifists, nearly 60% indicating that there can never be a good reason for War. Further, nearly 80% decried the use of Nuclear weapons in a belligerent role. There are a lot of people mis-using the emotional horror of the Holocaust for their own ends. Something that no true survivor of the Nazi death camps would ever countenance. Those people know that suggestions that the hippies did it are trite and insulting. Ms Johnstone has done no good and a lot of harm. Ends: