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3 Responses to “Pat Robertson & Orlando, just to be clear”

1. Charles Cameron Says:
   June 12th, 2016 at 10:59 pm

   OTOH, this from Pastor Steven Anderson of Faithful Word Baptist Church, Tempe, AZ:
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   Excerpt:

   I will say this: The Bible says that homosexuals should be put to death, in Leviticus 20:13. Obviously, it’s not right for somebody to just, you know, shoot up the place, because that’s not going through the proper channels. But these people all should have been killed, anyway, but they should have been killed through the proper channels, as in they should have been executed by a righteous government that would have tried them, convicted them, and saw them executed. Because, in Leviticus 20:13, God’s perfect law, he put the death penalty on murder, and he also put the death penalty on homosexuality. That’s what the Bible says, plain and simple.

   To the best of my understanding, that’s fully in line with the theo-political doctrine taught by the late Roussas John Rushdoony in his Institutes of Biblical Law.

2. Charles Cameron Says:
   June 13th, 2016 at 12:35 am

   Hoo boy, and then there’s this, from the Shia Sheikh Farrokh Sekaleshfar, quoted on a Central Florida news channel a couple of months ago
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   [ but SEE HIS REBUTTAL below ]:
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   Accompanying comment:

   In a 2013 speech Sheikh Sekaleshfar said this regarding gays, “Death is the sentence. We know there’s nothing to be embarrassed about this, death is the sentence…We have to have that compassion for people, with homosexuals, it’s the same, out of compassion, let’s get rid of them now.”:

   ^^

   Rebuttal — just posted 20 minutes ago on the Sheikh’s FB page:

   EMAIL MESSAGE, BY SHEIKH SEKALESHFAR, SENT TO NEWS CHANNEL REPORTER (ABOUT 2 MONTHS AGO) WHO STARTED THE STORY – (NO REPLY HAS BEEN GIVEN TO DATE)
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   On the 29th of March, Eyewitness News, on WFTV channel 9, released a story airing extracts of an academic presentation I had given at the University of Michigan in 2013. They have grossly misrepresented the facts and published a story that is far from the truth. Simply stated, it is libel and defamation. Further aggravating this incredible misreporting is WFTV’s violation of AP standards and practices, which requires reporters to at least attempt to contact subjects directly for a response before publishing statements about them. Had they done so here, which they certainly did not, I would have refuted every such claim made in the first instance.
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   “Killing homosexuals is the compassionate thing to do” is a dangerous statement wrongly attributed to me and I can see why many people have become offended on hearing such a statement as aired on WFTV. The impression given by WFTV is that I am openly sanctioning the murder of homosexuals. This is wholly false in every sense. Furthermore, the edit and misattribution of my words represents one of the most blatant and reprehensible breaches of ethics in journalism. It is never acceptable to misrepresent sources.
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   Firstly, as an academic seminarian, I point to fundamental principles of academic discourse to engage in academic discussions on various views, whether I agree with them or not – as stated in the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure ‘Academic freedom is essential to these purposes and applies to both teaching and research. Freedom in research is fundamental to the advancement of truth. Academic freedom in its teaching aspect is fundamental for the protection of the rights of the teacher in teaching and of the student to freedom in learning. It carries with it duties correlative with rights…’ The defamatory publication by WFTV attempts to silence academic discourse by manipulating my discussion to imply that I condone violence.
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   Secondly, the speech was presented as an academic exercise – not a personal opinion, verdict or in support of violence. Such academic settings from the outset, by their very nature, are distant and mutually exclusive to those that incite hatred.
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   Thirdly, also wrongly attributed to me was the phrase ‘the only way gays and lesbians can be forgiven is to die’. This is nonsense. Islam states they must repent before God like any other sinner. As mentioned in the original 1 hour lecture, a school of jurists have ruled that the sentencing is solely under specific circumstances which rarely arises in the real world. Moreover, the WFTV story stated that I have ‘been condemning homosexuals since at least 2013’. This is also untrue. Taking quotes out of context and misrepresenting me the way it was done is not only unethical and dangerous in this context; it also calls into question the credibility of the news organization. The speech at the University of Michigan, in 2013, was the first and last time before March 29th that I had spoken about the issue. Love the sinner, not the sin is an Islamic philosophy and way of life. Hence, the term ‘condemning’ qualifies to actions, not people. Thus, WFTV’s statement that I have ever, let alone continue to, condemn any person or group of people is blatantly false.
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   I request that the above statement be included in the online version of the WFTV story posted here http://www.wftv.com/news/local/iranian-doctors-planned-talk-on-islam-and-homosexuality-outrages-some-in-sanford/185803158
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   There were no attempts on behalf of the reporters and staff at WFTV to contact me directly for a statement, therefore again breaching a major tenet of journalistic ethics. Please afford me the courtesy of representing myself in your news story as this was denied to me before the story aired on television and now, on the Internet.
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   Peace be upon you all
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   Farrokh Sekaleshfar

3. Charles Cameron Says:
   June 13th, 2016 at 6:12 pm

   Barth — a British blogger whose interests frequently overlap with mine — has examined the whole lecture from which the video above was culled, and writes:
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   QUOTE:
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   The full talk he gave in Dearborn can be seen on YouTube here [Barth gives a link, but I’ve dropped the video in below this para for convenience] – his “death is the sentence” comment, which is now notorious after the massacre in Orlando, comes at 58 minutes.
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   On the one hand, the overall impression from the video is that the softly-spoken Sekaleshfar places so many limitations around the possibility of an execution that gay people could survive discreetly in an Islamic society:
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   Inside their houses they can do whatever they want, they’re free… Before we get to the sentencing it has to go through these barriers, we never get there…It’s like adultery… Four people never see the practice being done… It’s a sin, it has to be repented, that’s it, between them and Allah.
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   That seems not to accord with claims that Sekaleshfar is a “gays must die” preacher or that he “calls for the death of all homosexuals”, even in an Islamic society.
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   On the other hand, however, he soon after follows with this:
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   We have to have that compassion for people. With homosexuals it’s the same. Out of compassion, let’s get rid of him [sic, although one report transcribes as “them”] now. Because he’s contaminating society… That’s with anal intercourse… With the non-anal type, the death sentence is not executed. There it’s 100 lashes.
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   The implication of this is that although he acknowledges and respects the “barriers” to reaching a conviction, this is not because he wants a legal device to make life possible for gay people in an Islamic society.
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   :UNQUOTE
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   The juxtaposition of Sheikh Sekaleshfar’s full lecture with Pastor Anderson’s sermon raises quite a few issues, DoubleQuote-style.