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Tag: religion
‘Serial Killer’ of Muslim Men Identified as 51-Year-Old Afghan Migrant
The suspect the media labeled a ‘serial killer’ of Muslim men in Albuquerque has been identified as 51-year-old Afghan migrant Muhammad Syed.
Now wait for the story to disappear completely.
On Sunday, President Biden tweeted about the murders, suggesting that they represented some sort of hate crime committed against Muslims.
“I am angered and saddened by the horrific killings of four Muslim men in Albuquerque. While we await a full investigation, my prayers are with the victims’ families, and my Administration stands strongly with the Muslim community. These hateful attacks have no place in America,” tweeted Biden.
And with much of the media no doubt waiting with sick anticipation for the killer to be revealed as a white man, they’re probably crestfallen by the revelation of the actual culprit.
Indeed, tweets by major media outlets refused to name the suspect, with CNN merely calling him a “51-year-old man.”
After police in Albuquerque received tips from the Muslim community about the suspect, officials announced that Muhammad Syed had been taken into custody.
Syed, a Sunni Muslim, reportedly targeted the victims because he was angry over his daughter marrying a Shiite Muslim.
Possible serial killer targeting Muslim men in New Mexico
Police in Albuquerque, New Mexico, are investigating a possible serial killer case involving three young Muslim men who were shot to death within a 5-mile radius over the past nine months.
Each slaying was an ambush outside during evening hours, and it doesn’t appear that the men knew each other. Police are working with the FBI and are open to the idea that these could be hate crime killings, the Albuquerque Journal reported.
“While we won’t go into all the specifics of why we think that, there’s one strong commonality in all victims: the race and religion,” Deputy Cmdr. Kyle Hartsock with the Albuquerque Police Department said Thursday. “We are taking this very seriously. We want the public’s help in identifying this cowardly individual.”
All three men reportedly were immigrants who worked hard to make better lives for themselves in America. One man wanted to bring his fiancee to Albuquerque from Pakistan and start a family.
“We can’t call it a [hate crime] until we have someone identified and really know what their intention is in doing this,” Hartsock said. “And we don’t know enough yet to clearly say that — but that could change.”
Things Just Got A Whole Lot Worse for Bishop Robbed During Sermon, as His Criminal Past Suddenly Gets Exposed
A New York City pastor who said he was robbed in the middle of his sermon on July 24 may not be the innocent victim he portrayed himself as.
According to The City, a lawsuit filed last year in Brooklyn Supreme Court accused the pastor, Lamor Whitehead, of defrauding 56-year-old Pauline Anderson out of $90,000.
Anderson alleged Whitehead convinced her to invest most of her savings into one of his firms. She was a parishioner at the Brooklyn campus of Leaders of Tomorrow International Churches, where Whitehead is a bishop.
Anderson said Whitehead promised in turn for the money, he would help her buy a house despite her bad credit history.
In the lawsuit, she said she wrote a $90,000 cashier’s check to Whitehead in November 2020. She said he was supposed to give her a monthly allowance of $100 to pay living expenses.
According to the lawsuit, Whitehead allegedly had not paid the monthly payments or given any update on buying her a home.
When Anderson questioned him about it, he allegedly said he was treating the $90,000 as a donation to his then-campaign for Brooklyn borough president and did not need to pay it back.
“Mr. Whitehead fraudulently induced Ms. Anderson to liquidate her entire life savings to pay him the ‘investment’ of $90,000.00, promising to use the funds to purchase and renovate a house for her,” the lawsuit alleged.
“Ms. Anderson was instead left with nothing but a vague promise by Mr. Whitehead to pay the funds back in the future followed by an assertion that he had no further obligation to do so.”
Utah Ritualized Sexual Abuse Investigation: The Mormon Church And Child Sexual Abuse
An investigation into ritualized child sexual abuse was first announced by the Utah County Sheriff’s Office on May 31st. The USCO released a statement detailing how “multiple county and federal agencies are investigating reports of ritualistic child sexual abuse from as far back as 1990”. I have been following the investigation since the initial announcement and reporting on various angles of the story. I encourage readers to spend time with the previous four parts of this series, particularly the third report on the history of similar allegations in the state of Utah.
For this report I will be looking at the historical record, including lawsuits, church records, and previous reporting from other outlets to document the history of allegations involving members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, otherwise known as the Mormon Church. I have spoken with current and former members of the Church who hold varying views regarding allegations of ritualized child sexual abuse.
Some former members of the Church of Mormon believe the church itself is corrupted at its root which allows for these types of activities to happen in the first place. I have also spoken with members of the Church of Mormon who acknowledge that the church has a pedophile problem, but do not believe the core structures of the church are infected by pedophiles.
I want to make it clear that this investigation is not intended to be an attack on anyone’s religious beliefs, or individual Mormons. Nor is this piece intended to paint the picture that the entire Church of Mormon is aware of the reports of child sexual abuse. Although some former members of the church have gone so far as accusing the Church of Mormon of being a front for Masonic and/or Satanic activity, I am not ready to make such a judgement. However, I do believe these controversial claims warrant further investigation.
Shinzo Abe’s Murder Suspect Claims Motive Of His Attack
Tetsuya Yamagami, 41, was unemployed and had served in the Maritime Self-Defense Force (MSDF) for three years until 2005, according to police.
He was arrested in the Japanese city of Nara where he allegedly shot Abe, who was delivering a campaign speech ahead of the July 10 upper house election.
Yamagami, when apprehended, admitted his intention to kill Abe whom he believed was connected to a religious organization that had bankrupted his family, The Asahi Shimbun reported, citing investigative sources.
“My family joined that religion and our life became harder after donating money to the organization,” Yamagami was quoted as saying by the sources.
The suspect told investigators that he initially targeted the organization’s leader, “but it was difficult,” so he decided to change target.
“I took aim at Abe since I believed that he was tied [to the organization]. I wanted to kill him,” he said. Yamagami also admitted that he attempted to make explosives.
An unnamed source, who was identified as Yamagami’s relative in the report, said the suspect’s family “fell apart” because of the religious group, and that he was “convinced that Yamagami suffered damage from the organization.”
The suspect used a handmade gun measuring 40 centimeters in length and 20 centimeters in height. Police also found similar guns, explosives, and cylindrical objects during searches at Yamagami’s apartment in Nara.
Yamagami had previously worked as a dispatched staff worker for multiple companies after resigning from MSDF. He started working at a manufacturing company in the Kansai region in 2020 but left in May for health reasons.
War on churches: Pennsylvania town cracks down on feeding the homeless
A lot of powerful people in this country think it’s really important to put religion in its place. They reduce the free exercise of religion to the freedom of worship, and they argue that faith should be strictly private. They also believe that a church building must be exclusively for worship and not for any of the other aspects of people living out their faith.
Pottstown, Pennsylvania, is a working-class town of 20,000 between Philadelphia and Reading. It has more than its share of poverty, which is why Christ Episcopal Church and Mission First Church run robust aid programs, especially during and after the pandemic. The churches give out free meals to the public once a week, provide counseling and mental health support, and hand out groceries, toiletries, and other staples for free.
But the Pottstown government is having none of it. According to local law, a church building can be used only for worship and “those accessory activities as are customarily associated” with worship. In June, a zoning officer sent a violation notice instructing the churches that they must cease their good deeds or go through the zoning hearing board to seek a variance.
“Civil action will commence with the Districts Justice if these violations are not corrected,” the zoning officer wrote in a letter.
Local governments have a long and storied history of stopping religious congregations from serving the poor. Mike Bloomberg wouldn’t let a synagogue donate bagels to homeless shelters. Dozens of other cities have outlawed feeding the homeless.
Pottstown’s actions against the churches are particularly striking because they don’t even involve a safety or food regulation. Instead, the town is attempting to weaponize the very definition of what a church building is in order to prevent worshippers from using it to follow the command of Jesus Christ: “When I was hungry, you fed me.”
“It is the opinion of this office that the use of the property has changed and, by definition, is more than that of a Church,” the zoning officer wrote. He included the zoning code’s definition of a church: “A building wherein persons assemble regularly for religious worship and that is used only for such purposes and for those accessory activities as are customarily associated therewith.”
It’s a horribly crimped view of what a church is, and it’s a view the churches’ leaders reject.
These Mormons Have Found a New Faith — in Magic Mushrooms
On a Sunday afternoon in March, a group of 30 strangers huddle under a park pavilion in Salt Lake City, Utah, sipping hot cocoa and shaking hands shyly as snow clots the cottonwoods. A clean-cut gang of mostly white professionals, they are united by their interest in the Divine Assembly, a two-year old church with 3,000 members that considers psilocybin its holy sacrament.
The church’s co-founders, husband and wife Steve and Sara Urquhart, mingle quietly with the psychedelic-curious, many of whom are either new to tripping or considering their maiden voyage. Steve sticks to the sidelines, every so often reaching to smooth a conical white beard that, combined with his blue eyes and bearlike frame, make him look like a punk Santa Claus. The long beard is the only outer marker of his new identity: Before pivoting to mushroom churches, Urquhart was one of the most powerful Republicans in the Utah State Legislature, serving from 2001 to 2016, with a stint as majority whip in the House before eventually moving over to the Senate. Former colleagues and friends recall his small-government brand of Republicanism as “rock-ribbed.” He was also, like more than 60 percent of Utah and approximately 86 percent of the Legislature in 2021, deeply, devoutly Mormon.
“We were all the way in,” Urqhuart says of the proudly peculiar American religion with about 6.7 million adherents in the U.S. and about 16.6 million globally. Founded by Joseph Smith in 1830 during the Second Great Awakening in upstate New York, Mormonism (or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as church authorities requested it be called in 2018, though many Latter-day Saints, or Saints for short, still use the term “Mormon”) bases its teachings on the revelations of Smith, whom they consider a prophet. According to Smith, who claimed to have translated the Book of Mormon from a pair of gold plates inscribed with “reformed Egyptian,” Latter-day Saints are God’s chosen people destined to restore the original Christian gospel — a gospel that included, they professed up until 1890, polygamy.
“I knew all the secret handshakes,” Urquhart later divulges after one shot of tequila, and he means it quite literally, demonstrating a dizzying pattern of grips, bumps, and daps that look straight out of a Monty Python skit.
In all likelihood, Urquhart and others believe now, Smith lifted those handshakes and many other ceremonial elements from the Freemasons, the then-popular secret society that counted Smith as a member. Urquhart also believes, 100 percent seriously, that the LDS Church (the mainstream one he and Mitt Romney are from, not the fundamentalist offshoots depicted in Under the Banner of Heaven) is a cult. Specifically, he says, alluding to the church’s polygamist history and fact that some bishops still ask teens if they are masturbating, “a sex cult with really bad sex.”
Church or cult, Urquhart crashed out of it around 2008. In the park that Sunday, he is in good company. Although the Divine Assembly is not limited to former LDS members, or “post-Mormons” as they refer to themselves, the majority of the crowd by default is, and they’re aching for a new kind of spirituality to fill the void. One couple, Yesenia and Guillermo Ramos, tell me they left the LDS Church in 2012, after it began to feel like the opposite of what they thought it stood for. “God is love,” Yesenia says with conviction, but within the church, she says she felt judged for her decision to be both a mom and a nurse, rather than a stay-at-home mom. Furthermore, Yesenia says, she was sick of the pressure to appear perfect all the time, a common complaint among LDS women that Dr. Curtis Canning, president of the Utah Psychiatric Association, has called “Mother of Zion Syndrome.”
Utah Ritualized Sexual Abuse Investigation: Is There a History of Ritual Abuse in Utah?
As the Utah primary draws near, the investigation into “ritualized child sexual abuse” has garnered more than 120 tips related to claims of ritualistic sex rings. Let’s examine the history of these allegations in Utah.
In the nearly 4 weeks since the Utah County Sheriff’s Office announced an investigation into allegations of “ritualized child sexual abuse” in three Utah counties, they have received more than 120 tips in the form of phone calls, texts, and emails. UCSO Public Information Officer Sgt. Spencer Cannon told the Salt Lake Tribune that the office has “pulled in” sergeants with experience in sex assault cases to help review the information.
The Last American Vagabond (TLAV) has been following the unusual situation since May 31st when the Utah County Sheriff’s Office announced they were working with multiple county and federal agencies investigating reports of ritualistic child sexual abuse from as far back as 1990. The Sheriff’s Office said the investigation began in April 2021. The investigation subsequently discovered previous reports alleging “similar forms of ritualistic sexual abuse and trafficking” that occurred in Utah County, Juab County, and Sanpete County during the time between 1990 and 2010.
Following the announcement of this investigation by Utah County Sheriff Mike Smith, Utah County Attorney David Leavitt held a press conference where he shared a 151-page document titled “victim statement” related to a 2012 case involving allegations of sexual abuse of children. Leavitt and several other people are named in the statement as being involved with a group practicing ritual child sex abuse. He claimed the Sheriff’s investigation was a political attack on him related to the June 28th primary elections in Utah.
As TLAV reported last week, courtroom records revealed that Utah County Attorney David Leavitt lied when he said the 2012 case was dismissed by his predecessor because it was “unbelievable,” lacking evidence, and the story of a “tragically mentally ill” woman.
The Salt Lake Tribune has also reported that USCO Sgt. Cannon said the report that Leavitt was referencing was not what started the sheriff’s investigation last year. “We had a victim come forward and disclose abuse of this nature,” Cannon told the SLT. “And so that’s what started our investigation. The case that David Leavitt spoke about is not the case we initially started investigating. It’s not the case that we became aware of in April of last year.”
Cannon did acknowledge that the detectives became aware of the 2012 case and the allegations against therapist David Lee Hamblin, but did not say if the case was part of the current investigation.
As Utahans prepare to vote in the primary on June 28th — a race in which both Sheriff Mike Smith and Utah County Attorney David Leavitt are both up for re-election — we wait to see if there will be any additional announcements, indictments, subpoenas or any official action taken.
To better understand this current investigation, we have examined hundreds of pages of Utah government documents, articles, and allegations of ritualized sexual abuse to paint a picture of this history.
Paving that road to Hell…
Hellbound and Down 
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