A MUSLIM bus driver stunned passengers when he stopped his vehicle and began praying in the aisle this week –with the engine still running.
The driver, according to this report, parked without warning – then used a fluorescent jacket as an improvised prayer mat. He took off his shoes, knelt down facing Mecca, and began to chant.
The prayer session held up the bus for more than five minutes with no-one able to get on or off.
Mercifully, there were no randy animals on board the No 24 bus when the driver stopped to pray
Passenger Gayle Griffiths, 33, complained to Transport for London about the bizarre incident on the No 24 bus in Gospel Oak, north London. She had boarded the bus a few minutes earlier on her way home from work.
She said:
I have done the journey a million times before but I was in a hurry to get home to pick my little girl up from school. We had just picked up and let off people at a bus stop and moved off again when the driver stopped the bus very suddenly.
He got out of his cab, leaving the engine running, and walked towards the middle exit door. He laid out a fluorescent jacket on the floor and I thought that somebody must have been sick and he was covering it up. But then he took off his shoes and began praying. I was gobsmacked and quite bewildered.
Miss Griffiths said the bus driver didn’t give the passengers any explanation as to what he was doing. He hadn’t addressed the passengers at all. I didn’t say anything and nor did anyone else. I thought it would all be over in 30 seconds but it went on for over five minutes.
It even went through my mind that this might be some sort of terrorist attack with the bus blown up because I had heard that suicide bombers prayed before attacks.
Everyone was looking round in a mix of shock and amazement. It was truly bizarre, ludicrous and aggravating.We are delayed often enough as it is in London. We live in a multi-cultural society but there is a time and a place for prayer and the middle of a journey with a busload of passengers is not it.
Transport for London said it had apologised to all the passengers for the delay to their journey and said all Muslim drivers are being reminded that they should pray during statutory rest periods rather than hold up services.
A TfL spokesman said:
The bus company, London General, has had a word with the driver as this is not something that should be happening. TfL apologises to passengers for any inconvenience this may have caused them.
He added:
We understand that there is some flexibility in the Muslim faith as to the times of day that drivers can pray. TfL and the individual bus operating companies acknowledge and value the diversity of their staff. As diverse employers, TfL and the bus operators provide suitable prayer or quiet rooms at garages and other key locations for staff who wish to practise their faith.
We have asked London General to remind drivers who have a requirement to pray to use these facilities during their rest periods.
In March, 2008, The Sun carried a story that London bus driver Arunas Raulynaitis, a Muslim, had turfed passengers of a bus in Slough so that he could pray, and said distressed passengers thought he might be a fanatic. An subsequent investigation by the bus company found that Raulynaitis had actually used his statutory rest break to engage in a conversation with Allah, and there was no question of him breaking any rules.
The Sun issued an apology.
Hat tip: BarrieJohn
ARMED robbers disguised in burqas escaped with thousands in cash after carrying out a post office raid in Paris.
The crime – which took place yesterday in the suburb of Athis Mons – comes as the French government faces growing calls for the controversial garments to be banned.
President Nicolas Sarkozy himself has described them as a “security risk”, saying they provide the perfect cover for criminals or terrorists.
Innocent shoppers ... or robbers in drag?
Now those fighting for the ban claim the robbery – which is the first of its kind in France – shows how useful the burqa is as a disguise.
It took place at around 10.30am, when two robbers carrying pistols entered the main post office bank building in Athis Mons, which has a large immigrant Muslim community, mainly from North Africa.
Once inside they ordered a bank clerk to take out the equivalent of £4,000 in cash by pointing a pistol at him. After ten minutes they fled to a nearby car park and escaped.
Police fear that they will not be able to identify the robbers on CCTV cameras. Said one detective:
It was a perfect disguise. Their faces and bodies were completely covered.
The robbery led to Le Parisien, the main daily paper in the French capital, to ask:
Will this first robbery using a burqa re-launch the debate about the Islamic veil being worn in public places?
A government committee has already recommended that burqas should not be allowed in civil buildings and on public transport, and a full ban could follow.
Britain is no stranger to burqa crime.
Last November two robbers – dressed in full-length women’s burkhas – pistol-whipped a post office manager during a daylight raid in Bradford.
The attackers bundled their 38-year-old victim into the premises as he opened the shop.
They brutally struck him on the head with the butt of a handgun when he was unable to open a safe.
But the raiders then panicked and fled empty-handed when they saw a customer peering through the window of the post office, in Oak Lane, Manningham.
Last summer a robber dressed from head to toe in a traditional Muslim woman’s burqa raided a travel agent, and also made off with thousands in cash.
And in 2008, a 6ft 6in robber hidden beneath a burqa was involved in a £200,000 raid on a jewellery store in Smethwick, West Midlands.
You can read more about burqa villainy here.
Hat tip: BarrieJohn
XTREME Ministries, a small church near Nashville, Tennessee, has developed a brutal way of making Christianity more manly – by staging “cage fights” incorporating martial arts.
Pastor John Renken, 37, founded the church which doubles as a mixed martial arts academy. Its motto is:
Where Feet, Fists and Faith Collide.
This fella, Mr Penn, defeated his opponent, Mr Sanchez, at the conclusion of an Xreme Ministries fight
According to The New York Times, Renken’s ministry is one of a small but growing number of evangelical churches that have embraced mixed martial arts – a sport with a reputation for violence and blood that combines kickboxing, wrestling and other fighting styles – to reach and convert young men, whose church attendance has been persistently low.
Recruitment efforts at the churches, which are predominantly white, involve fight night television viewing parties and lecture series that use ultimate fighting to explain how Christ fought for what he believed in. Other ministers go further, hosting or participating in live events in cages.
The goal, these pastors say, is to inject some machismo into their ministries — and into the image of Jesus — in the hope of making Christianity more appealing.
Said Brandon Beals, 37, the lead pastor at Canyon Creek Church outside of Seattle:
Compassion and love – we agree with all that stuff, too. But what led me to find Christ was that Jesus was a fighter.
The outreach is part of a larger and more longstanding effort on the part of some ministers who fear that their churches have become too feminised, promoting kindness and compassion at the expense of strength and responsibility.
Said Ryan Dobson, 39, a pastor and fan of mixed martial arts who is the son of lunatic James C Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, a prominent evangelical group:
The man should be the overall leader of the household. We’ve raised a generation of little boys.
These pastors say the marriage of faith and fighting is intended to promote Christian values, quoting verses like “fight the good fight of faith” from Timothy 6:12. Several put the number of churches taking up mixed martial arts at roughly 700 of an estimated 115,000 white evangelical churches in America. The sport is seen as a legitimate outreach tool by the youth ministry affiliate of the National Association of Evangelicals, which represents more than 45,000 churches.
Sanchez v Penn
Fighting as a metaphor has resonated with some young men.
Mike Thompson, 32 – fighting name “Fury” – is a former gang member and student of Renken’s who until recently had struggled with unemployment. He said:
I’m fighting to provide a better quality of life for my family and provide them with things that I didn’t have growing up.Once I accepted Christ in my life I realized that a person can fight for good.
The trend, though, has its critics. Said Eugene Cho, 39, a pastor at Quest Church, an evangelical congregation in Seattle:
I don’t live for the Jesus who eats red meat, drinks beer and beats on other men.
And Robert Brady, 49, the executive vice president of a conservative evangelical group, the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, agreed, saying that the mixed martial arts motif of evangelism:
So easily takes away from the real focus of the church, which is the Gospel.
Many black churches have chosen not to participate.
Men ages 18 to 34 are absent from churches, some pastors said, because churches have become more amenable to women and children. Said Tom Skiles, 37, the pastor of Spirit of St. Louis Church in Arnold, Mo:
We grew up in a church that had pastel pews …The men fell asleep.
In focusing on the toughness of Christ, evangelical leaders are harking back to a similar movement in the early 1900s, historians say, when women began entering the work force. Proponents of this so-called muscular Christianity advocated weight lifting as a way for Christians to express their masculinity.
Paul Burress, 35, a chaplain and fight coach at Victory Baptist Church in Rochester, said mixed martial arts had given his students a chance to work on body, soul and spirit.
Win or lose, we represent Jesus. And we win most of the time.
THE Catholic Church in Australia, where Catholicism is said to be in full retreat, is now having to look to the poorest countries in the world to find priests.
According to Earth Times, the farther a country leaves poverty behind, the greater the difficulty it has finding young men wanting to train as priests.
Is this Filipino Catholic priest, pictured sprinkling holy water on a baby Bengal Tiger on World Animal Day in 2008, about to be poached? (AP Photo/Aaron Favila.
Australia used to recruit Catholic pastors from Ireland and other parts of Europe where affluence was yet to prevail. They have stopped coming and now congregations look to India, the Philippines, even Spanish-speaking South America, to put someone in the pulpit.
Before flying off to India on a recruitment drive, Brian Heenan, a Catholic bishop in the north-east city of Rockhampton, said:
It’s not a new thing for a country like Australia to be welcoming priests or missionaries from another nation to help us sort of fulfil our priestly ministerial needs.
As was the case with the Irish last century, the offer is a short-term contract with an option to stay for life.
So these priests will come, please God, for maybe two years or three years and if all is going well they’ll probably go back to India and others will come and take their place.
A quarter of Australia’s 21 million people profess to be Catholic. But only seven per cent of Catholics in their 20s regularly attend Mass.
Seminaries have closed for want of seminarians. And only a third of seminarians stay the course and become priests.
Catholicism is in retreat in Australia faster than perhaps anywhere else in the world.
Heenan said:
There are so many opportunities available for young people once they have finished their education. And I think they find those much more attractive than going off to a seminary or a training college, where the rate of recompense or pay is very ordinary.
THE body of a 16-year-old Muslim girl has been unearthed in Adiyaman, south-eastern Turkey, where she was buried alive by relatives.
According to this report, Medine Memi was found in a sitting position with her hands tied, in a two-metre hole dug under a chicken pen outside her home in Kahta.
The hole from which the girl's body was dug
Her father and grandfather have since been arrested and are due to face trial over her death. Her mother was also charged but has since been released.
Police made the discovery in December after a tip-off from an informant.
Medine had first been reported missing 40 days earlier.
The informant told the police she had been killed following a family “council” meeting.
Media reports said the father had told relatives he was unhappy that his daughter – one of nine children – had male friends. The grandfather is said to have beaten her for fraternising with the opposite sex.
A postmortem examination revealed large amounts of soil in her lungs and stomach, indicating that she had been alive and conscious while being buried.
An official involved in the case said:
The report is blood curdling. According to our findings the girl, who had no bruises on her body and no sign of narcotics or poison in her blood, was alive and fully conscious when she was buried.
It also emerged that Medine had repeatedly tried to report to police that she had been beaten by her father and grandfather days before she was killed.
Her mother, Immihan, said after the body was discovered in December:
She tried to take refuge at the police station three times, and she was sent home three times.
Medine’s father is reported as saying at the time:
She has male friends. We are uneasy about that.
Although honour killings are not infrequent in Turkey, the especially gruesome manner of Medine’s death has shocked the nation.
Official figures have indicated that more than 200 such killings take place each year, accounting for around half of all murders in Turkey.
Hat Tip: PaulEd and Alan H
WE have just been informed by Leo Igwe, Executive Director of the Nigerian Humanist Movement, that the lunatic head of the Liberty Gospel Church, Helen Ukpabio, failed for the second time to appear in the Federal High Court in Calabar to press a lawsuit she initiated against him and a number of others – and the case was struck out.
Leo Igwe, pictured last year in London
Ukpabio, whose church had been carrying out a campaign of terror against “child witches”, demanded 200 billion naira ($.1.3 million dollars) in damages after Igwe and others staged seminars and conferences to oppose her witchcraft-related child abuse campaigns.
She, and several of her church members claimed that gatherings organised by the Nigerian Humanist Movement and other child rights groups infringed their rights to spread the gospel.
At one of the conferences last year, church members disrupted proceedings, and assaulted Igwe.
In an email to the Freethinker, Igwe said:
Today [Feb 4] the Federal High Court struck out the case brought against me and other child rights campaigners including the government of Akwa Ibom state. Last November Ukpabia and some of her church members went to court seeking to enforce their rights to believe in God, Satan and witchcraft. They asked the court to order us to award them damages for ‘unlawful and unconstitutional infringement of their rights’.
For the second time, Helen and her lawyers were not in court. So the lawyer leading the defence team, Barrister Madaki asked the court to strike out the case due lack of diligent prosecution. And the court granted his request.
Mad evangelist Helen Ukpabio
He added:
The striking out of this case is a welcome development. It is a victory for justice, human rights and the rule of law in Nigeria. This decision by the court is a vindication of the child rights campaigners and the great work they are doing to save the lives of children abused and abandoned in the name of witchcraft in Nigeria.
It is a clear evidence that Helen Ukpabio and her church members have no case.
They instituted this court action to stop their arrest and prosecution for the attack on us on July 29 in Calabar.
Nigerian Humanist Movement and its partner groups will continue to work and campaign to eradicate all forms of human rights abuses in the name of witchcraft.
The Freethinker was founded in 1881 by GW Foote, an outspoken critic of religion. After the publication of 
