Tag: religion

Court Forbids Mom to Take Daughter, 13, to Normal Christian Church – Used the Word ‘Cult’ in Official Docs

The Maine Supreme Court this week upheld a lower court ruling preventing a mother from taking her 13-year-old daughter to a church it referred to as a “cult.”

The decision could set a bad precedent for other jurisdictions to grab onto nationwide. But the religious liberty law firm representing the mother, Emily Westbrook, in the case has promised an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

A look at Calvary Chapel of Greater Portland’s doctrines and description in the court opinion makes it sound like it believes in pretty standard Bible-based teaching: the Old and New Testaments are the Word of God; the Trinity (Father, Son, Holy Spirit); original sin; salvation through Jesus Christ; the Second Coming; and the rest.

Maine affiliate WMTW-TV reported that Westbrook challenged a 2024 custody order prohibiting her from taking her daughter to Calvary Chapel, arguing it violates her right to free exercise of religion guaranteed under the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

“A district court judge sided with the child’s father, Matthew Bradeen, ruling that some of the church’s teachings could be psychologically harmful to the girl. The order allows Bradeen to solely decide on his daughter’s involvement with Calvary Chapel Church. When it comes to any other religious organization, the order states that the parents share rights and must discuss decisions,” WMTW further noted.

The Maine Supreme Court, in its unanimous decision Tuesday upholding the lower court’s order, said, “We are also unpersuaded by Bickford’s claim that the court evinced hostility toward her religion by describing her church in offensive terms, including referring to it as a ‘cult.’ The court used the word ‘cult’ only in describing the testimony of [Janja] Lalich, the stipulated expert on ‘cults.’”

“The court noted that ‘cult’ serves as a shorthand for what sociologists like Lalich call ‘closed social systems’ and that Lalich identified Bickford’s church as one of these systems. The court used ‘cult’ in summarizing Lalich’s testimony, but it did not otherwise refer to Bickford’s church as a cult or a closed social system,” the justices added.

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Man charged with burning down historic New Brunswick church as social media posts raise new questions

Tonight on The Ezra Levant Show: a historic New Brunswick church is burned to the ground, and a local parishioner is charged with arson. On his Facebook page, he celebrates a friend jailed for fighting a pipeline. Then, in another video of the burning church, a voice calls out that friend’s name and says, “Your wish has come true.”

Saint-Simon is a small Acadian fishing village on New Brunswick’s north shore. Until August 24 it had a 109-year-old church, built by the great-grandparents of people who still live there. The largest wooden church left in the province.

The alarm sounded around 3:30 a.m. Four fire departments responded. It was too late. The building was wood and it was gone in two hours. Only the chimney stands. The fire marshal says arson.

Claudette is co-president of the parish council. She cried when the steeple came down. Standing in the ashes, she asked why.

“He took away our church, that person. Why? Especially since he was a parishioner of our parish.”

The RCMP moved fast. Within hours they charged Gilles Mallet, 68, a local man and a parishioner of the church he is accused of burning. His bail hearing in Bathurst on Friday, Aug. 28 did not finish. It resumes Monday, Sept. 7. 

The charge is unproven. Mallet has not entered a plea. A publication ban covers the bail hearing, so Rebel News cannot report what was said in that courtroom.

Everyone in Saint-Simon offered the same explanation. One troubled man, nothing bigger. That may be right. But Mallet’s Facebook page is public, and it shows a man who spent years inside a political movement two provinces away.

His profile picture shows him beside a war canoe named Chief Dan George, on a trailer marked Takaya Tours, the tourism company of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation. His shirt reads “Warrior Up! Ta’ah said.” Ta’ah is Amy George, Chief Dan George’s daughter, who coined the phrase in 2012 against the Kinder Morgan pipeline. It became the rallying cry of the B.C. anti-pipeline movement.

A reader who knew Mallet from an Indigenous community near Lillooet, B.C., where Mallet lived for years, pointed Rebel News to the page. He said he had left that community himself over what was being said there about Christians and the Church. Mallet stayed.

On March 1, 2025, Mallet posted: “In honour of my friend Stacy Gallagher who’s in jail because of his fights against the pipeline.”

Gallagher is a B.C. pipeline protester with a criminal record. On March 2, 2021, Justice Shelley Fitzpatrick sentenced him to 90 days for criminal contempt after he defied an injunction at Trans Mountain’s Burnaby terminal. He was released on bail pending appeal the next day. Rebel News cannot confirm he was in custody in 2025. That is Mallet’s description.

There is a video on Mallet’s timeline of the church burning, filmed from the road as the fire trucks arrive. Mallet did not post it. An acquaintance uploaded it around Aug. 30, while Mallet was in custody. A man behind the camera says: “Stacey Gallagher, your wish has come true.”

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Muslim Convert Minnesota AG Keith Ellison Forced to Return $12,500 From Somali Fraudsters After Secret Tape Caught Him Promising to “Fight These People” and Unfreeze Their Welfare Cash

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to statewide office in Minnesota and a convert from Catholicism, has quietly returned at least $12,500 in campaign cash from Somali figures tied to the massive Feeding Our Future welfare fraud after a secret recording surfaced of him huddling with the same crowd to fend off state investigators.

According to the Center of the American Experiment, the five refunded contributions included donations from Gandi Yusuf Mohamed and Liban Alishire, both of whom became defendants in the Feeding Our Future case.

As The Gateway Pundit reported in December, the 54-minute recording, obtained by the Center of the American Experiment and later entered as a trial exhibit, captured Ellison schmoozing with Somali-American operators who would later be charged or convicted in the Feeding Our Future scheme that looted more than $250 million in federal child-nutrition money meant for hungry kids.

The meeting participants complained that state regulators were acting in a “racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic manner” by asking questions about phantom meal sites.

“The only way we can protect what we have is by inserting ourselves into the political arena, putting our votes where it needs to be, but most importantly, putting our dollars in the right place,” Feeding Our Future consultant Abshir Omar said.

“But if you are secure in your donor base, and if you are secure in your power base, you can act the way you want to act,” Omar continued.

“Money is freedom,” Ellison replied with a laugh.

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All Christian schools in Jerusalem shut after Israel refuses entry to Palestinian teachers

Christian schools in Jerusalem have been forced to indefinitely delay the start of the new academic year after Israeli authorities failed to renew entry permits for more than 70 teachers and staff living in the occupied West Bank.

Palestinians holding West Bank IDs generally require Israeli-issued permits to cross checkpoints into East Jerusalem. But Israeli authorities failed to renew entry permits for more than 70 teachers and staff “suddenly and without prior notice,” the General Secretariat for Christian Educational Institutions in Jerusalem said in a press statement shared with the media on Monday.

“Accordingly… it has been decided to suspend school attendance in the schools of the city of Jerusalem beginning Tuesday morning, 1 September 2026, until the necessary permits for teachers and staff are reissued and renewed,” the Secretariat said.

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‘Everyone Is Afraid’: Serbian President Warns NATO Over Kosovo Bridge, Christian Persecution

President Aleksandar Vucic of Serbia told Breitbart News exclusively that he and everyone in Serbia and Eastern Europe fears what may happen to Christians and Serbs in Kosovo after the removal of troops guarding a bridge, and that he is calling on Washington and NATO to step in to help fix the situation before things spiral out of control.

“I am afraid, and everyone is afraid,” Vucic told Breitbart News on Wednesday. “That is why we will beg and ask. It won’t be hard for me to phone everyone, even if I have to call Washington, to help with this issue… Enough with the persecution of the Serbian and Christian population in Kosovo and Metohija, and I believe that the people in Washington will understand that.”

Vucic previously sat down with Breitbart News for an extended exclusive interview in Belgrade–Serbia’s capital–back in May.

Vucic’s statement comes amid withdrawal of NATO forces guarding a bridge called Ibar Bridge in northern Kosovo that has been closed to vehicular traffic and has been guarded by NATO forces called the Kosovo Force, or KFOR for short. The bridge essentially marks the boundary between the predominantly Albanian Muslim south of the city of Mitrovica and the predominantly Serbian Christian north—and Vucic fears the opening of the bridge to vehicular traffic may end up leading to the Christian population being under attack.

The bridge is open to pedestrian traffic so people can cross it if they want to, but vehicular traffic reopening might quickly intensify interactions between people on the two sides. KFOR forces announced earlier in August that they would be beginning a gradual transition of its permanent presence from the Ibar Bridge and instead that is handing over day-to-day security responsibilities to the local Kosovo Police—although KFOR has said it is going to retain a visible presence in northern Kosovo.

Vucic has been sounding the alarm worldwide, calling everyone from NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte to European Union leaders and other European officials to leaders in Washington, as well asking for this decision to be paused and reversed and to keep KFOR in charge of the bridge to protect the Serbian Christians on the other side of it.

Serbia has snap elections coming up in mid to late October, and there are still some major decisions on the horizon regarding Kosovo’s future, as well as the region awaits a judgement coming down in mid-September from the Hague on the crimes-against-humanity case against former Kosovo President Hashim Thaci. Many people believe Thaci was wrongly targeted—by the very same Jack Smith who later came directly after American President Donald Trump—because Thaci had agreed to work with Trump in Trump’s first term to find a longterm solution to the issues between Serbia and Kosovo.

Kosovo’s caretaker Prime Minister Albin Kurti—who endorsed Democrat Joe Biden over Trump in the 2020 election here in the United States—has been so controversial that everyone from even the Biden administration to the Trump administration to NATO and more have condemned him. Ric Grenell, who was acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI) in Trump’s first term and also oversaw the Serbia-Kosovo talks back then, told Breitbart News on Wednesday that Kurti cannot be trusted.

“Albin Kurti has been condemned by NATO, the Europeans and both the Biden and Trump Administrations because he unilaterally creates chaos and instability,” Grenell told Breitbart News in a statement on Wednesday. “America has never seen Kosovo with such a fascist leader. I’ve regularly been to the northern part of Kosovo where many Serbs make their homes and I’m concerned, once again, by the current situation unfolding. People who believe differently should be able to live next to each in peace, but they also deserve politicians who don’t work to destabilize delicate situations.”

It is unclear what Washington or Brussels may do here moving forward. Breitbart News reached out to U.S. Ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker and his team at the U.S. mission to NATO for comment on the matter but has not received a response by press time.

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Has Netanyahu Undermined the US?

Netanyahu, I believe, is a sick individual. In 2024, in his Knesset speech, Netanyahu said: “I’ve been warning about Iran for 30 years.”  It was reported on March 3rd, during a visit to a site struck by an Iranian missile, Netanyahu stated: “We read in this week’s Torah portion, ‘Remember what Amalek did to you.’ We remember—and we act.”

In 1 Samuel 15:2-3, God gives King Saul a specific, direct order to carry out this command. The prophet Samuel relays the message: “This is what the LORD Almighty says: ‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys. ‘”

The harshness of the command in 1 Samuel has disturbed Jewish scholars for centuries, leading to various interpretations that move beyond a literal call for genocide. If Netanyahu believes that genocide is the command of God, that is NOT in the self-interest of the United States. He knows you cannot accomplish regime change from the air. This is the very first time when we are in a partnership with another country who is really calling the shots here where the interests of Netanyahu are by no means the same national interest of the United States.

This Iran War is Netanyahu’s war, not America’s. He is consumed with hatred and he will NEVER stop because he sees only total annihalation of Persia. This has been an ancient feud that goes back thousands of years. We should NOT be involved because Netanyahu will NEVER accept peace so this war will NEVER see a resolution while it is draining the resources of the USA leaving the country vulnerable on a grand scale. The US can be defeated conventionally because of Netanyahu.

Let me make this very clear. The US has bombed the hell out of Iran to the point that the stockpile of conventional weapons has been seriously depleted. I warned from the outset, if I was on the other side of the table, I would use this war to drain the US as we have used Ukraine to weaken Russia. There is no way to win this war. Iran cannot be bombed into oblivion. Sources familiar with internal data state that the US has fired a vast number of its most advanced long-range missiles. Reports suggest that almost ALL of the Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) and the newer PrSM have been used during the campaign. These are costly, land-based missiles valued at well over $1 million each.

It would take boots on the ground to secure the Strait of Hormuz meaning you must occupy 50 miles inland on each side of the Strait permanently. Anyone who is NOT biased can see Netanyahu has dragged us into his endless war trying to fulfill 1 Samuel 15:2-3.

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Democrat DSA Candidate Angie Nixon Quotes Communist Cop-Killer Assata Shakur While Campaigning in Church

Democrat Senate candidate Angie Nixon of Florida has been working very hard to distance herself from the DSA, but she blew her cover while campaigning in a church.

Nixon quoted the notorious cop-killer and communist Assata Shakur, who fled to Cuba after breaking out of an American prison years ago.

Leftists just love figures like Shakur, who they learn about in college from Marxist professors who paint them as victims and heroes.

Breitbart News reports:

Angie Nixon, a Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member who is vying to be the next senator of Florida, is still pulling quotes from Marxist cop killer Assata Shakur, although conveniently leaving out the origins of her words now that she secured her nomination and is trying to appeal to general election voters.

Speaking in a Miami church, Nixon — who recently attempted to distance herself from DSA despite her status as an active member — told the congregation, “We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

“Our chains are them telling us that we don’t have enough money for health care for all when they’re spending a billion dollars on a ballroom you’ll never get to dance in. Our chains are the fact that they are spending money to defeat ballot initiatives that you paid into that should have gone toward health care for low-income kids,” she said.

“Our chains are the fact that they are closing public schools so that they can subsidize their for-profit private school education for the billionaires and the millionaires, but they’re closing schools in our neighborhood,” she said, emphasizing, “Those are our chains.”

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Over 100 Girls Under 12 Identified as Likely Forced Marriage Victims in Britain

British government data has revealed that at least 100 children under the age of twelve have been identified over five years as likely to have been subjected to a forced marriage, which opponents have tied to mass migration.

A Freedom of Information request for Home Office figures made by the Press Association has disclosed that between 2021 and 2025, the Forced Marriage Unit received tips from family, friends, police, teachers, and social services of at least 100 girls 11-years-old or younger who were believed to be forced into getting married.

Of those identified, 27 of the girls were said to have been under the age of five when they were being set up for a forced marriage, The Telegraph reported.

While the data is obviously limited to cases in which tips were placed to the Forced Marriage Unit — which in and of themselves do not constitute definitive proof — it is also the case that the government does not always disclose data surrounding child marriage for fear of leading to the public identification of victims.

Indeed, according to the report, during one of the years between 2021 and 2025, there were fewer than five potential victims within each defined age bracket, and therefore the Home Office declined to disclose the data for the entire year, given that the limited number of entries would potentially make it easier to identify specific victims.

Reform UK Shadow Home Secretary Zia Yusuf attributed to the apparent rise in the number of forced child marriages to PM Boris Johnson’s post-Brexit migration reforms, which saw record waves of migrants flood into the country.

“This sudden rise in forced marriages tracks almost perfectly with the Boriswave, which saw the Tories import four million new people into the UK. The Conservatives will never be forgiven for this complete and utter betrayal,” he said.

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DOJ Admits Anti-Christian Bias

The Justice Department’s own announcement describes a report — variously cited at 200, 210, and 565 pages across different DOJ statements, with roughly 1,200 footnotes — compiling findings from seventeen federal agencies on how “prosecutions, policies, and practices demonstrated anti-Christian bias throughout the federal government” during the Biden years. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche framed the conclusion in blunter terms, describing a “systematic culture” of bias that ran through law enforcement, tax policy, education, and healthcare. Senior DOJ counsel Camille Verone laid out fourteen specific findings in interviews accompanying the release, including Catholic schools losing federal school-lunch funding for declining to endorse gender-identity policy, HHS pressuring Christian medical providers on gender-affirming care under threat of losing federal funds, and the EEOC declining to protect religious objections to COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

The report also alleges the DOJ enforced the FACE Act — the federal law protecting access to reproductive health clinics — unevenly, with pro-life protesters drawing harsher sentences than people who vandalized pregnancy centers, and it claims the IRS scrutinized churches for hosting political candidates while overlooking comparable conduct by Democratic officials. These are specific, agency-by-agency allegations, not a single anecdote, and they form the bulk of the task force’s case that bias was structural rather than incidental.

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New York Gov. Kathy Hochul Dons Hijab While Speaking to Group of Muslim Men

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul was spotted wearing a hijab while addressing a predominantly male Muslim audience in New York City on Friday.

Video circulating online shows the Democratic governor speaking in a black headscarf during a visit publicized by the Islamic Center of New York.

“I want to thank His Excellency Mr. [Tareq] Albanai,” Hochul says in the clip, before thanking an imam and other officials associated with the organization.

In Islamic culture, the hijab is traditionally worn as a sign of “modesty,” intended to shield a woman’s body from the gaze of men.

It is not the first time Hochul has worn an Islamic head covering in public.

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