UK

Protesters gather outside Ofgem HQ calling for ‘payment strike’ on energy bills

Pa Reporter
Fri, August 26, 2022 

People protest outside the Ofgem HQ in Canary Wharf (James Manning/PA) (PA Wire)

Around 100 protesters gathered outside Ofgem headquarters in London on Friday urging consumers to withhold payment for “astronomical” energy price hikes they could not afford.

Members of the crowd shouted “enough is enough” and held banners reading “Freeze profits, not people” on the street in Canary Wharf in London.

On Friday, Ofgem confirmed an 80.06% rise in the energy price cap, sending the average household’s yearly bill from £1,971 to £3,549 from October.

The demonstration was promoted by Don’t Pay UK, a grassroots movement describing its aim as “building a mass non-payment strike of energy bills starting on October 1”.

A woman holds a banner during a protest outside the Ofgem HQ (James Manning/PA) (PA Wire)

Tracy Baldwin, 52, said deaths caused in part by the price hike were inevitable and would be “nothing short of corporate manslaughter”

Ms Baldwin, a carer from Yorkshire, said: “The price hikes are astronomical. There’s going to be deaths from the vulnerable, the disabled, the elderly.

“Ofgem are not doing anything to tackle the problem. When people start to die it’s going to be nothing short of corporate manslaughter.”

Teacher Jamie Grey called for “hitting them where it hurts, withdrawing our financial support for a barbaric regime of energy companies that have put profit before people”.

The 34-year-old, from Tower Hamlets, said she teaches children who are already living below the poverty line whose families would be unable to stay warm this winter.

The demonstration was promoted by Don’t Pay UK (James Manning/PA) (PA Wire)

She added that Ofgem “don’t care about us at all” and said vulnerable people would die over the coming months as a result of the cost-of-living crisis.

“Ofgem don’t care about us. All we have is each other – historically we know mass non-payment and mass movements do work,” Ms Grey said.

Protester Tony Cisse said: “People are going to be driven into poverty. The people being asked to absorb the price rises are the people at the bottom.”

Ofgem boss Jonathan Brearley said the regulator had to make “difficult trade-offs” setting the new price cap.

He warned costs would come back to customers in the long run if companies were to fail.

Speaking to Channel 4 News, Mr Brearley said: “The price cap was designed to do one thing, and that was to make sure that unfair profits aren’t charged by those companies that buy and sell energy. And, right now, those profits in that market are 0%.

(PA Graphics) (PA Graphics)

“What it can’t do is it can’t say, given the cost of the energy, that we can force companies to get from customers less than it costs to buy the energy that they need, because otherwise they simply can’t buy the energy for those customers.”

He added: “So, we have had to make some difficult trade-offs and we have had to make some difficult choices.”

A former vice president of BP said the latest cap should be suspended and called for taxes to be increased on oil producers if they are not facing “real costs”.

Nick Butler, who worked for the company for 30 years, said he did not think the Ofgem cap should have been announced with no “modification or mitigation”.

He told BBC Scotland’s The Seven he believed some energy companies were “milking the system” and that those who could not prove they faced real supply costs should see a tax hike.

“(Some) people, I think, are milking the system and that’s why I absolutely believe this has got to be made a transparent market, and the good companies will welcome that transparency because it will restore an element of the trust that has been lost,” Mr Butler said.

UK nearly doubles energy price cap in cost-of-living crisis 

AFP 2022-08-26       

Britain announced on Friday a vast 80 percent hike in electricity and gas bills, in a dramatic worsening of the cost-of-living crisis before winter as the UK awaits a new leader.

Regulator Ofgem said its energy price cap, which sets prices for consumers who are not on a fixed deal with their supplier, will in October increase to an average 3,549 pounds (US$4,197) per year from the current 1,971 pounds, blaming soaring wholesale gas costs after the Ukraine-Russia conflict.

"The increase (in the cap) reflects the continued rise in global wholesale gas prices, which began to surge as the world unlocked from the COVID-19 pandemic and have been driven still higher to record levels by Russia slowly switching off gas supplies to Europe," Ofgem said in a statement.

The news sparked an outcry from charities who said families faced one of the "bleakest Christmases" for years, with UK inflation already in double-digits and forecast to strike 13 percent in the coming months due to runaway energy bills.

The near-doubling in the cap will likely tip millions into fuel poverty, forced to choose between heating or eating, according to anti-poverty experts.

Britain is already suffering from its highest inflation rate since 1982 and is predicted to enter recession later this year.

"We know the massive impact this price cap increase will have on households across Britain and the difficult decisions consumers will now have to make," added Ofgem boss Jonathan Brearley on Friday.

"I talk to customers regularly and I know that today's news will be very worrying for many."

'Zombie' government

Britain's rampant cost-of-living has dominated the race to succeed Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson, with political opponents accusing him of leading a zombie government as inflation escalates.

Both front-runner Liz Truss and rival leadership contender Rishi Sunak are grappling with how to address the crisis.

Gas comprises a major part of Britain's energy mix, with tens of millions of homes relying on gas-powered boilers for their heating.

Household and business consumers, energy suppliers and opposition politicians are clamoring for urgent government action to do more to avoid putting the most vulnerable in desperate situations.

The University of York has estimated 58 percent of UK households are at risk of fuel poverty by next year.

The crisis is forecast to worsen from next January, when average bills could top 5,000 pounds according to some projections as Ofgem updates the cap every three months, rather than the previous norm of twice a year.

The leader of the main opposition Labour party, Keir Starmer, has called for a freeze in energy bills at the current cap level.

Outgoing premier Johnson has vowed to leave major fiscal decisions to his successor, who will be announced on September 5 following a summer-long leadership contest.

Good Law Project to sue Ofgem over price

 cap failure

“The announcement today will devastate families. Just who and what is Ofgem for? Do not be fooled. This is a choice. And the choice they’ve made is to let low-income consumers and small businesses bear the brunt of this crisis."

by Joe Mellor
2022-08-26




Legal campaign group Good Law Project, Fuel Poverty Action, and the Highlands and Islands Affordable Homes Warmth Group have announced they are planning to sue the energy regulator Ofgem, over its failure to mitigate the impact of rising energy bills on consumers.

This is likely to be the first legal action of its kind over the energy bills crisis, and others may join the action – including vulnerable individuals disproportionately impacted by Ofgem’s actions.

As you can see Martin Lewis is beyond angry about this decision to hike energy prices.

Watch



In response to Ofgem’s announcement today that it is raising the price cap to an eye-watering £3,549, Jo Maugham, Director of Good Law Project said:

“The announcement today will devastate families. Just who and what is Ofgem for? Do not be fooled. This is a choice. And the choice they’ve made is to let low-income consumers and small businesses bear the brunt of this crisis.

“We believe Ofgem can – and should do more. We intend to put the question before the High Court, and will ask for a fast-tracked timeline to reflect the urgency of this crisis”.

Poverty

The Ofgem announcement will push millions of people into poverty this winter and the average household bill up by £1,578 – an 80 per cent increase from the current cap.

GLP will ask the High Court to ensure the regulator upholds its legal duties to, among other things, carry out an impact assessment before confirming the price cap increase, including assessing the disproportionate impact on elderly people, children and people with disabilities.

Good Law Project argues that Ofgem has the power to do more to protect vulnerable people and believes before raising the cap, Ofgem is legally required to:Provide evidence it has carried out a proper impact assessment
Consider appropriate mitigation measures for the most vulnerable, including a lower social tariff.

In July, the campaign group wrote to Ofgem, expressing concern about its decision-making. We asked it to provide proof of its impact assessments. It failed to produce any such evidence. Last week GLP put the regulator on notice of formal legal action if it failed to uphold its duties. A formal response to the letter is expected today, but today’s announcement provides no indication that an impact assessment has been carried out.

Related: Watch: Energy price cap to rise more than 80% from Oct – Martin Lewis’ emotional response is chilling

Energy price cap increase: ‘Alarmed’ charities urge government to ‘act now’


26 Aug 2022


Charities have called for urgent government action after Ofgem announced today that the typical household energy bill will increase to £3,549 ( $4,193.14 US Dollar ) a year from 1 October.

The cap set by the government energy regulator, which limits how much providers can charge customers in England, Scotland and Wales, is set to rise by 80% from it's current level of £1,971 for the average household.

Amid a cost-of-living crisis, charities said the government must step in to prevent millions of people from being pushed into poverty.

Sector bodies also warned that charities themselves are being hit by increased energy bills, while demand for their services is set to increase.
Turn2us: ‘Not acceptable to consign more than a quarter of us into poverty’

Thomas Lawson, chief executive of national poverty charity Turn2us, said: “Today’s meteoric rise in the energy cap will cripple those of us in the UK already struggling to stay afloat. This is no longer a choice between heating and eating, but not being able to afford either. This is as big an emergency as the impact of Covid and needs a similarly confident government response.

“As one of the wealthiest economies, it’s simply not acceptable to consign more than a quarter of us into poverty.”

The charity is calling on government to introduce a cap on energy costs and increase the value of Universal Credit and legacy benefits by a minimum of £25 a week, saying “the government must act now”

Joseph Rowntree Foundation: This ‘will plunge many into destitution’

Katie Schmuecker, principal policy adviser at the JRF, said: “It is simply unthinkable that the price rises announced today can go ahead without further government intervention on a significant scale. To force the burden of rising wholesale energy prices onto households will plunge many into destitution.”

She added: “People are already being pushed into heart-breaking situations, disconnecting themselves from energy, skipping showers and going without food so their children can eat. And this is before we’ve even hit the big price rise and colder weather. Households are crying out for certainty and security.”

JRF research has found that almost half, 47%, of those on low incomes who are not in receipt of means-tested benefits are already going without one essential item or food, one third are in food insecurity and more than one fifth can’t afford to keep their home warm.

Groundwork: ‘We are alarmed at the volume of requests for help’

Graham Duxbury, Groundwork UK’s chief executive, said: “As a charity that supports people living in fuel poverty, we are alarmed at the volume of requests for help that are coming through.

“Energy companies, charities and independent experts all agree that the measures in place are not enough. As well as more emergency financial support and a long-term commitment to improving the energy efficiency of our homes we also need more – and better coordinated – advice.”

So far this year, Groundwork’s Green Doctors in Yorkshire have given out almost twice as many emergency fuel vouchers as in the whole of 2021-22. They have seen a 25% increase in fuel debt support requests and a 46% increase in people having mental health issues associated with stress from money issues.

The organisation said funding on some programmes has almost all been allocated, with four months left of the year, “before the cold weather begins and people start relying on their heating to stay warm and well”.

Centre for Ageing Better: ‘Already around 10,000 people die a year because their homes are too cold’

Carole Easton, Ageing Better’s chief executive, said: “Millions now face a long, cold and dangerous winter. Already around 10,000 people die a year because their homes are too cold. There is a clear and present danger that this number will rise significantly this winter without drastic measures.”

She said “immediate financial support is necessary” and “we also need government to take proactive and sustainable steps”.

Easton added: “UK homes are among the least energy efficient in Western Europe and the financial support government currently provides to homeowners to do something about this is insufficient. Four in five homes that are the coldest and are occupied by households on below-average incomes don’t even qualify for government support.”

Trussell Trust: ‘We have already seen a 50% increase in need at food banks’

Polly Jones, head of policy and research at the Trussell Trust, said the charity is “deeply concerned” that this “will be disastrous for people on the lowest incomes and will leave many with no option but to use a food bank”.

“In recent months, we have already seen a 50% increase in need at food banks compared to before the pandemic,” she said.

The charity is calling on the government to take immediate action and have joined together with 70 organisations to call for at least doubling the additional support offered to people on the lowest incomes.

“Furthermore, the government should provide better, long-term funding for local crisis support, so local authorities can provide much needed support directly in our communities. Only then will we be able to end the need for food banks in the future,” she added.

Family Fund: ‘The outlook is very grave’

Cheryl Ward, chief executive at Family Fund, said: “We know that current severe inflationary pressures are affecting millions of people across the land, but for families caring for disabled and seriously ill children, who have even greater costs, the outlook is very grave. The choices between putting food on the table, paying for energy or clothing and sensory equipment are stark”.

“We very much welcome this latest £150 payment from government,” said Ward, “but we know from the increasing calls we are now getting from our families, facing spiralling costs on every front, that more support will be needed. We are therefore, along with other charities, asking ministers to consider urgently how future support can be given.”

Pro Bono Economics: ‘Charity incomes are already feeling the squeeze on donations’

Nicole Sykes, policy and communications director at PBE, said: “Without further action, the new energy price cap leaves charities and many of the millions they support facing a dire financial situation heading into winter. Many of those who require support from charities are especially exposed to rising energy costs, particularly disabled people with conditions made worse by cold or needing energy to run lifesaving equipment.

“Charity incomes are already feeling the squeeze on donations as a result of the cost-of-living crisis. This hike in the energy price cap will only step up demand for charity services, while increasing charities’ own costs - particularly in older buildings with less insulation, and facilities offering energy intensive services like hydrotherapy.

“It is vital that the new prime minister acts fast with a package of support to hold back a wave of hardship, debt and destitution. But we also need a longer-term strategy for growth and economic security, to build up our national resilience to future shocks.”

NPC: ‘Destitute people can’t wait, it’s time to get on and give’

Dan Corry, chief executive at NPC, said: “Today's announcement confirms our worst fears. As we have been saying for some time, this cost-of-living crisis is going to be as big a threat to livelihoods and well-being as Covid-19 and a great deal worse for those at lower income levels. Many more people need help, yet charities will find it harder to support them as energy prices and soaring inflation increase their own costs and erode the value of their reserves and pre-pledged donations.

“Charities will undoubtedly strain every sinew not to let down the people they work with. But they need help.

“Of course, the government should do more and show the same courage it did during the pandemic with the furlough scheme and the Universal Credit uplift. But, as we said in our recent report on confronting this crisis, philanthropists and grantmakers also need to do everything in their power to help charities, and they should be doing it now. Destitute people can’t wait, it’s time to get on and give.”

Converting To Christianity, Islam: Does It Prove Anything? – Book Review

"From fire by water: My journey to the Catholic faith," by Iranian American Sohrab Ahmar

 July 11, 2023 

By Eric Walberg

Religious conversions later in life are generally greeted as evidence that something terrible must have happened to the converter. The Onion published a satire in 2016, ridiculing Paul D’Amatol, who took up a life of Christian piety in late middle age. It must be ‘drugs or maybe he killed someone in a car accident. Something super messed up.’ 

No room in satire for something good as the cause. Interestingly, it’s not Protestant evangelical born-again-ism but the Catholic bells-and-smells and Islamic mysticism that attract those interested in spiritual growth as they approach the end, despite (because of?) Rome’s/ Islam’s hard teachings on divorce, homosexuality, the ordination of women. Catholics and Muslims take their religion seriously.

From fire by water: My journey to the Catholic faith, a memoir by Iranian American Sohrab Ahmari, is provocative, to say the least.

Such conversions are rare and never casually broadcast. Muslims do not look kindly on such apostates. You can interpret that as you like, but I figure it is a good indication that they take their beliefs seriously, something that we can’t say about most of the Christianities or Judaisms on offer. Yes, schisms abound; even the monolithic Catholic church struggles to keep the faith in this truly godless age of ‘anything goes’.

But good for Ahmari. His own life has been charmed, from a bohemian childhood in post-revolutionary Iran to Wall Street Journal London correspondent and still in his mid-30s. He remembers his grandparents being pro-revolution, as Iranians generally are bitter about foreign meddling, with good reason. But many of the urban, educated young look to the West. The taste of western living under the Shah, the open culture, comedy, the arts, racey theatre, the high life – all suddenly gone. His uncle went to the US right away. Ahmari and his mother emigrated in 1993.

His religious training in Tehran was actually stimulating and entertaining. His first instructor was clearly from the wild tribal lands, hair disheveled, shirt half tucked in, a rube from the hicks thrust into downtown Tehran. His acting out of the Battle of Karbala transfixed little Ahmed. He learned that Hussein stuck by his friend unto death. Stood for the Truth.

He lived what is probably a typical 1990s childhood in the urban upper middle class – pirate Hollywood films, Shah-era soap operas, Twain, Salinger, whatever foreign. He finally cursed God for his frustrations, his dysfunctional home, the unjustice ways of adults, though he realized if there is no god, then there is no one to address. And called himself atheist.

Morality police

He recounts a trip to the Caspian second house of friends, a long standing Iranian tradition of group parties at large vacation homes. Booze in hot water bottles. The low grade fear of a swoop by the morality cops. Much of the conversation during the party weekend is about incidents evading, sweet talking, bribing them. 

Once, when he was 13, this happened at noon. Cop to party host: ‘Aren’t you ashamed? Not even noon prayer time and you stink of gin.’ Turning to Ahmed, ‘How old are you?’ ‘5,’ he mumbled. He still can’t explain what was going through his mind, maybe if he was younger they wouldn’t be so severe?

Well, that broke everyone up. Even the chief cop couldn’t stop chuckling, and said: ‘I guess you’re just out having some fun. So let’s taste your sweets.’ The guests hurried rounded up their cash and gave it to him.

The whole scene is ridiculous. You can interpret as you like. The ‘victims’ were in fact sinning, realized it, and managed to get out of the scrape with punishment. Yes, such morality police are not pretty, but is our lack morality police, lack of any such control over our sins, really better? To Ahmari’s credit, he depicts the police more as keystone cops and the adults as children scolded for being naughty.

Life really would be better without the constant need to get plastered to enjoy yourself. In rape and car deaths alone. Egypt has a workable model. Only Copt Christians can sell wine and spirits, and there are a few miserable holes-in-the wall on a back street to buy a red or white local wine and ouzo. i.e., discourage it. Do NOT promote it. It’s a social evil. The incidence of alcoholism is minuscule in Egypt. 

So I sympathize with any government trying to follow that sensible morality. The Taliban have wiped out drug addiction and poppy growing. No help from the West, just sanctions and loud whining about western values. It is easy to be an armchair critic of Islamic states for their harsh justice, but all evidence points to the US invasion of Afghanistan as the cause of soaring opium production, and the US absence and Taliban policy was the way to stop it. If we bothered to listen, the Taliban would explain that in Islam human life is sacred, and allowing people to defile themselves as addicts is haram.

America, Nietzsche, Marx, Kerouac

A budding atheist at this point and in love with America, Ahmari finally gets to Utah, only to find himself and his mother in a seedy trailer park with an old truck that barely functioned. From well off in Tehran to dirt poor in Mormon land, which was just as oppressive to him as living under the mullahs. ‘At least the mullahs let you have a-tea-and-a-cigarette in peace.’ 

Conversation at his uncle’s was as specious and boring as non-Iranian Americans, about new cars, classic cars, trucks. ‘This wheels-and-gears babble I found so tedious as to make me long for the weather talk. For all the miseries of the Islamic Republic, there at least people had something to say.’ He joined the nihilist teen crowd but didn’t have sex as the local teens were doing. 

He later read the Egyptian Muslim Brother Sayyid Qutb’s reflections on his stay in the US in 1949, expressing horror at the sexually charged atmosphere he saw everywhere. Qutb reacted by becoming a Muslim radical, reacting to Nasser’s secular socialism. Ahrami was reacting to Islamic fundamentalist Iran, so ‘I took my discomfort at physical contact with strange women to be a shortcoming–on my part. I was insufficiently modern and rational in my habits and ways.’

Discovering Nietzsche’s Thus spoke Zarathustra was a turning point for him, ironically beginning his path to Catholicism. God is dead, biblical morality reflects the will to power of slave-like men, invented for and by people who envied the strong and virile, proscribes strength and virility. The superman is beyond good and evil. Values may be relative but the superman’s actions are by definition better. And the herd, the ‘last men’, live a sterile, gray happiness. 

That explained for Ahmari what he saw first in Utah, then Washington State. He joined the local Trotskyist group. For Ahmari, again ironically, Marxism’s greatest attraction was its fanatics, its religious spirit, which he later dismissed as ‘secularized theologies’. The two great critiques of religion, Neitzsche and Marx, were Ahmari’s path to enlightenment. 

He had one more detour, postmodernism and identity politics. Marx claimed to reveal the truth about capitalism, but post-Marxists like Foucault,* reframed civilization as a repressive apparatus designed to discipline and control human difference, whether sexual, racial or cognitive. Even empirical science amounted to a sort of performative ‘language game’ that served the needs of power. We ‘perform’ gender in response to societal expectations (Butler). Politics is no longer to seize the means of economic production but to resist racist and sexist hegemony, starting with language. 

All this materialism denied the existence of human nature. The individual is a victim of impersonal forces, be they language, economics or history, so not responsible for his actions. i.e., a license to sin. 

He dabbled in the Beats, Kerouac, Burroughs, fascinated as much by their dissolute lives as their prose and verse. Debauchery as an authentic style. Which he aped with his own. And increasingly disgusted himself. He dropped the Trotskyist politics, as it was the much like the petty intriguing of mullahs in Iran. Just different hats. 

Virtue over intersectionality

His radical studies pushed him into a stint of social injustice, teaching disadvantaged Americans for four years with Teach for America. His best friend was Yossi, an Israeli American whom he admired for his strict discipline with the undisciplined underachievers, who loved this squeaky dynamo precisely for bringing them to order, and for his genuine enthusiasm, making him the outstanding teacher with by far the best results in English. A virtuous teacher. A novelty in inner city Brownsville, on the Mexican border.

Ahmari had turned into a Don Juan and binge drinker by then, his Iranian modesty discarded. He was slowly realizing the lefty emphasis on ‘intersectionality’, the hidden ‘structures of oppression’ race, gender and sexuality, the need for more money, vs good old-fashion discipline, honesty, and excellent teaching, was wrong. Throwing more money, new technology at a broken system will not improve things. The whole left agenda is a recipe for disaster. ‘The friendship with Yossi proved to be a providential source of grace and a spur to conversion.’ More irony: Zionist Yossi joins Neitzsche, Marx and Beat poets as Ahmari’s spiritual mentors.

He realized there are universal, underlying truths, virtue, and that awareness of these universals come from an inner voice, conscience, the soul, urging him to do good and shun evil. He realized there must be a personal god as the ultimate source of absolute truths. 

His Marxist theories dumped, his leftist views dumped. Welcome to the club of ex-Trotskyists, born-again neocons. ‘I wanted nothing more to do with man-made utopias of any kind. In fact, I wanted to rededicate my life to thwarting the utopians. I became a conservative almost instantly.’ I would identify this as Ahmari’s ‘conversion’, at least as far as his working life goes. Who cares if you pray now, just be sure to keep the neocon engine purring along.

That is not to dismiss Ahmari’s sincerity concerning his beliefs about truths and virtue. I agree with Ahmari that ‘character and morality trump and determine the order of material things, rather than the other way around.’ Class war won’t improve society unless there is a foundation in society of morality, virtue, that both sides in the ‘war’ respect. And we have Darwin to prove it. A flexible personal code can never replace moral precepts. 

But then he goes and spoils it: ‘I had made peace with American society.’ 

Slave mentality vs free will

He saw through his earlier love of Nietzsche; while he still agreed that Christianity was behind egalitarian democracy, he saw this as a good thing, not a weakness. ‘The real peril was that western democracy would detach itself from its religious underpinnings.’ i.e., we could descend again into Auschwitz. As for Auschwitz, it was ‘possible because God had been pronounced dead and all the old ‘thou shalts’ declared null and void.’ ‘Western democracies were morally superior in large part because they still hewed to a Judeo-Christian line, however faded.’ 

Ahmari is definitely a foe of Iran’s Islamic state, seeing ‘Khomeini’s stern glare on my back’ when he reads of IS men blowing themselves up, though he fails to mention that Iran has been leading the fight against IS. WSJ journalist Ahmari’s knowledge of facts is sometimes faulty, and he dismisses Islamic governance as just more totalitarianism—no free will—a la Soviet Union or Nazism. Though Christian and Islamic theologies around such principles are largely the same, somehow, in his view, Christianity allows free will, is ‘better’. 

His critique of western decadence aligns with the Islamic critique. And he realizes this. ‘A skeptical and infertile West lacked the spiritual resources to deal with an energetic and virile Islam.’ But then he denies the value of shariah courts and insists the US firmly assimilate Muslim immigrants.

Ahmari’s next career move coincided with Iran’s suppression of the Green movement of 2009, when he was just starting out as a journalist. There is no doubt Ahmari is a talented writer, and when he offered the Wall Street Journal commentaries during that disputed months, he suddenly became a useful talking head articulating the western view with an Iranian face. His career took off and he was London editor by 2016, as he finished his conversion.

Conversion – beyond identity politics

The upshot: ‘My two decades as an atheist now appeared as squandered years, during which I had turned my back on God and neglected my immortal soul. Christianity was the precondition of true universality and true brotherhood.’

I would concur with Ahmari but replace Christianity with Islam as the preeminent religion of universality and brotherhood. Ahmari’s journey is quixotic, as he admits. The Judeo-Christian tradition is weak, very weak, and getting weaker as wokeness dissolves spiritual truths, and religious belief–apart from Islam–continues to decline.

Why Catholic? ‘My decision turned precisely on the question of liturgy.’ The smells-and-bells, the Latin Mass. ‘The metaphysical indifference so pervasive in England and the rest of western Europe’ he finds ‘positively revolting’. ‘Endless consumer choice and kaleidoscopic lifestyles, lifestyle-ism—clean eating, mindfulness, banana treatments—was all they had.’ 

The quasi secular post-Vatican II laid-back Catholicism was almost as bad as the evangelical Anglican church. ‘Evangelical Protestantism, for all its Spirit-infused hand raising and arm swaying, struck me as profoundly abstract. A ‘personal relationship’ built on words alone was incomplete.’ He now relished the supernatural things, which Protestantism downplays in the interest of scientism. 

Ahmari provides a sharp critique of postmodernism and the emptiness of modern ‘civilization’. Sin, salvation, the mystery of evil and the reality of his conscience, all pushed him out of his secular what-me-worry life. He committed to the strong version of Catholicism, praying every day at dawn, midday, dusk, preferably in church with others, kneeling. 

Almost exactly as if he had returned to Islam, brushed up on his Arabic, and rejoined the ummah as they prostrate in communal prayer five times daily, a vast ripple eternally revolving around the world following the sun. If some space aliens are monitoring us, that surely will impress them.

Like Ahmari, my decision to convert was at least part liturgy. Regular daily prayer is essential to a vibrant faith. One detail that further convinced me about Islam is the insistence on removing your shoes when you enter the prayer hall. Socks or bare feet leave worldly cares behind, leaving you to commune freely with Allah, united and in unison in full-body prayer. Another essential in worship is segregation and modest dress to minimize distractions from your focus in prayer. All of this is much as Christianity was practiced in the middle ages, when it was robust.

I kept looking for a convincing critique of Islam vs Christianity as the truly universal religion, but couldn’t find it. No doubt Ahmari purposely left Islam out to avoid a Salmon Rushdie fate, but I doubt he has taken his search for soul, spirit, conscience that far, or that, in deed, there is a convincing argument there.

Crusade redux

Ahmari points to legendary converts Cardinals Newman and Manning, GK Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene. The list of converts to Islam is also impressive: from Richard Burton (19th c), Marmaduke Pickthall, Leopold Weiss, to Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Keith Ellison, Dave Chappelle. 5,000 Britons convert every year. Converts add vigor to any religion but Catholicism and Islam seem to get the cream.

Ahmari has sampled everything, starting as a Muslim, atheist, Marxist, postmodernist, post-postmodernist, finally landing at the beginning, the alpha-omega, the monolithic Catholic church. For Ahmari, the jump is from the Islamic Jesus-as-prophet to the Christian Jesus-as-God, That is a rare transition, and, no unsurprise, seen as threatening to Muslims, especially when articulated and promoted in the West. Crusade redux.

As a convert, but the other way, from Presbyterianism to Islam, I wish Ahmari well in his new faith, and hope his spiritual growth continues. But his story is flawed. He conveniently converted to the empire‘s religion (that goes back to the founding of the establishment Church under Emperor Constantine), while admitting that the Judeo-Christian tradition has lost its pull, that only Islam is vibrant. He should look again to see why Islam is so resilient, and how that should shape his own spiritual journey.

He spent a third of a lifetime worshipping idols—the idol of ‘history’, ‘progress’, above all the idol of the self. English Catholicism especially attracts him, because it had suffered so much, despised and ridiculed, and yet was stronger that the ‘soupy and fast-secularizing Anglicanism that encircled it.’ Sadly, he doesn’t see that he’s still worshipping an imperial idol.

Alas, if he had reverted to Islam, though welcomed by the ummah, he would have been hounded, despised, no longer a famous WSJ journalist enjoying the perks of US hegemony wherever he is on the planet. No nice memoir dissing Islam. Perhaps the fate of another one-time darling of the empire. Keep on your journey, Sohrab.

—

*Ironically, in search of social justice, Foucault interviewed Khomeini and embraced the Iranian revolution in 1979.

Eric Walberg

Canadian Eric Walberg is known worldwide as a journalist specializing in the Middle East, Central Asia and Russia. A graduate of University of Toronto and Cambridge in economics, he has been writing on East-West relations since the 1980s. He has lived in both the Soviet Union and Russia, and then Uzbekistan, as a UN adviser, writer, translator and lecturer. Presently a writer for the foremost Cairo newspaper, Al Ahram, he is also a regular contributor to Counterpunch, Dissident Voice, Global Research, Al-Jazeerah and Turkish Weekly, and is a commentator on Voice of the Cape radio.

COUGH FOR JESUS
Here’s what it is like at Liberty University — which has refused to shut down due to coronavirus
March 26, 2020 By Agence France-Presse


by Alec MacGillis

Three Liberty University students, a young man and two women, sat eating lunch on Wednesday afternoon at a small table in the common dining area of the student union on the sprawling campus perched high above Lynchburg, Virginia. They compared notes on the suntans and burns they’d gotten on beaches during spring break last week. They joked about what it would be like to take the college’s gun-range classes remotely. A fourth student with a backpack strolled up to the table to chat with them for a few minutes.

The young man seated at the table mentioned that he was thinking of going to a Starbucks off campus but wasn’t sure it was safe to do so given the coronavirus raging across the country, which has sickened at least 65,000 people nationwide, more than 400 of them in Virginia and a few of them in Lynchburg.

His mention of the risk was striking given the context: There he and more than a dozen other students were, sitting in clusters around the dining area despite stickers scattered haphazardly across tables: “Closed for Social Distancing.”

This is the odd tension on display now in Lynchburg, where Liberty president Jerry Falwell Jr. has caused a stir by keeping the campus of the large evangelical Christian university open to students despite the calls of state officials and public health experts for social distancing to slow the virus’s spread and despite the university’s having recently shifted all instruction online to conform with state orders.

Falwell has minimized the threat of the coronavirus for months — two weeks ago, he compared it to the H1N1 “swine flu,” which experts say is not a comparable case — and he initially vowed not to follow the lead of other colleges in shutting down on-campus instruction, until Gov. Ralph Northam’s March 17 ban on gatherings of more than 10 people gave him no choice.

Falwell’s decision to keep the campus open to students this week after spring break was in keeping with his provocatively contrarian approach, and it buttressed the vows of President Donald Trump, whom Falwell has supported since early in the 2016 campaign, to lift social-distancing strictures as soon as possible. “I think we have a responsibility to our students — who paid to be here, who want to be here, who love it here — to give them the ability to be with their friends, to continue their studies, enjoy the room and board they’ve already paid for and to not interrupt their college life,” Falwell told the Richmond Times-Dispatch this week.


At the same time, Liberty’s decision to keep the campus open has met with such criticism — from a faculty member worried about her colleagues’ safety since they are still required to hold office hours, and from city leaders and the governor’s office— that the university is clearly feeling pressure to show that it is trying to minimize any public health risks. This has produced an odd dissonance between earnestly worded safety signs and notices on campus and Falwell’s ongoing ridiculing of coronavirus worries as alarmist, which make it hard for students to take the safety exhortations seriously.

Calum Best, a senior business and finance major from Alexandria, Virginia, and a member of the student government, has seen the effect of that dissonance since returning from break. He sees Falwell and other university officials calling the safety worries overblown in the national media, and then he sees classmates hugging and taking pictures of each other on the student center steps, or a group of at least a half dozen huddled together for a study session, or a professor of his standing in close conversation with another student and a campus security officer, or classmates heading off to game nights or group dinners at off-campus apartments. In an unusual turn, a university known for its strict “Liberty Way” — no premarital sex, alcohol, smoking or cussing — is now in a sense the most permissive. There aren’t even any more curfews in the dorms, since many residential advisers are gone.

“The real problem is just providing students a capacity and a venue to come back and do stupid things,” Best said in an interview. “Consistently, consistently, leadership is overemphasizing the effectiveness of the measures they’ve actually taken and downplaying the significance of this virus.”

Best added that there is a case to be made for keeping campus open — for foreign students, or students who really rely on the campus meal plan, or students like him whose parents are worried about having him at home and possibly infecting them — but it would need to be executed much better than what he has observed.

“It is a genuinely tough decision to close a university,” he said. “We can imagine a world in which they actually did everything they could to encourage sanitary measures and social isolation on campus. It wouldn’t necessarily be a terrible thing to keep campus open if you could be ensured of the reliability of safety measures. But they’re not.”

Students have received scant information from administrators about how to keep themselves safe from the virus, Best said. As damaging, he said, is the general message from the top, which has included Falwell spinning conspiracy theories about COVID-19 being a North Korean or “elite liberal” plot. “They could also just not be misleading and deceptive in their communications about the virus, and they’re deliberately choosing to do that,” Best said. He has been scolded for his outspokenness already: this week, Liberty’s senior vice president of university communications, Scott Lamb, called him at night to take him to task for a nonpublic Facebook post criticizing Falwell for hypocrisy for not yet issuing refunds to students who now have to settle for online classes. (Lamb did not respond to a question about the call.)

University officials estimate that about 1,900 students have returned to campus so far — a fraction of the 15,500 who normally attend classes there, about half of whom live in campus housing — but they say they expect that number could grow as high as 5,000. The feel on campus is of a college during summer break, when a small minority of students hang around for jobs or summer-term classes. As sparsely populated as the campus is, though, it’s startling to see students congregating in ways that are not happening at the countless colleges that have shut down.

At the student center, students dutifully stand 6 feet apart in line for their pita wraps and salads. But then they sit together to eat in the communal dining area, in ways that are no longer allowed at any restaurant in Virginia.

In the Jerry Falwell Library, named for the college’s famous founder, the father of the current president, social-distancing signs abound and some of the couches are piled on each other and strung in police tape. But some of the small glassed-in study rooms have at least four students grouped around the table, putting them much closer than six feet from each other. On Wednesday, a “Closed for Social Distancing” sign on a table didn’t stop one student from spreading her books and notes out across it for a study session. A librarian came through the periodical room, where The New York Times is conspicuously unavailable, and chided two students for sitting too close to each other. “You need to be 6 feet apart,” she said. “If one of you can’t lie down in between you, you’re too close.” As she walked away, they traded eyerolls.

In Green Hall, a large building on the north end of campus that includes a food court, students disregarded the distancing marks in the lines for the Dunkin Donuts and Chick-fil-A until food service workers reminded them.

Near Green Hall, a graduate student from Pennsylvania was leaving his job serving as an assistant to professors, which he said was what had required him and many other graduate assistants to return to campus after break. He questioned the decision to reopen the campus, even with the purported distancing measures. “They could have avoided all that if they just didn’t have anyone here,” he said.

Nearby, Ingrid Lindevaldsen, an undergraduate fashion major, was getting in her car to head back to her off-campus housing. She said that the university could have done a better job of limiting the students on campus to foreign students and those who truly had no other option. She herself had to come to campus to use the sewing machines for one of her classes, but she said she tried to leave as soon as possible once that was done. “I try to stay away, because there are so many kids here,” she said.

Adding irony to Falwell’s insistence on keeping the campus open is that Liberty is better positioned than most other universities to weather enforced distance learning. It has developed a hugely profitable separate operation called Liberty University Online, with as many as 95,000 people around the country taking courses in a given year. Many traditional undergraduates at the college already take some of their courses online. (The online classes have a reputation for being much less demanding.) If the coronavirus scare carries into the fall, colleges with a heavy online presence like Liberty would seem well poised to capitalize.

So far, though, the crisis has caused only turbulence for the online operation, due to the university’s insistence that the several hundred people who work for LUO — manning call centers, processing course registrations — continue reporting to work at the former insurance building where LUO is housed, according to several Liberty employees. A few employees with health conditions have been allowed to work from home, but on Wednesday, the LUO parking lot was still full of dozens of vehicles. “I’m just a worker,” shrugged one employee who was taking a break in his car when asked about the requirement to report to the office. “I come to work here.”

A similar scenario has played out at the Guillerman Financial Center, where about 250 people handle all of the university’s tuition and financial aid in an open office divided into two large spaces. One employee told me that workers have been growing increasingly anxious about infection and wondering how the office can be allowed to continue operating, given that it contains far more than the 10-person maximum and is hardly “essential.” “There are a lot of people coughing in that building,” the employee said. “I know it’s scaring a lot of people. Every time people cough, someone would say, ‘my God.’”

But on Wednesday morning, the staff was suddenly instructed to spread out more through the building, into training rooms, into supervisors’ offices, according to the employee. And in the early afternoon, they were told to disperse even further: go work from home for the next couple days. Their understanding, the employee said, was that a state inspector was headed to the building that afternoon.

Asked about the continued use of the two office buildings for hundreds of employees, Lamb, the university spokesman, pointed to an official statement from Falwell on Monday arguing that that the governor’s ban on gatherings of more than 10 did not apply to Liberty’s offices, because they were exempted the way any business workplace would be. “To the extent possible, in our workplace, we are adhering to social distancing recommendations, enhancing sanitation practices on common surfaces, and acting on appropriate workplace guidance from government officials,” Falwell said in the statement.

All this commotion, both in the office buildings and in pockets of the campus, stands in contrast to the handsome, historic downtown of Lynchburg, where there was barely a soul in sight on Wednesday afternoon. In one of the few businesses that were still open, a small gift store, owner Ron Schoultz was making protective face masks out of patterned cotton fabric to sell for $15 each. He flared immediately when asked about the decision by the big college on the hill to welcome hundreds of carefree students back to campus.

“It’s terrible,” he said. “It’s awful. It’s putting everyone else at risk.”

Will Young contributed reporting.

Liberty University is staying open because Jerry Falwell Jr. wants to own the libs
Bonnie Kristian

Illustrated | Getty Images, AP Images, iStock
March 24, 2020

Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr.'s allegiance isn't faltering.

President Trump spent the first few weeks of COVID-19's spread downplaying the seriousness of the risk and Falwell has taken up the charge. But the difference between Falwell and your average pandemic skeptic is he runs the largest Christian university in the country, and he has decided to use that position to make a potentially deadly political point.

While other universities, including private, Christian schools, have closed their campuses and emptied their dorms of all but the few students who truly have nowhere else to go, Falwell has taken Liberty in a different direction. Virginia's prohibition on gatherings of more than 10 people prevents most classes at the Lynchburg school from meeting in person, so the bulk of Liberty's instruction has moved online. But the dorms, normally housing about 16,000 students, remain open and ready to welcome residents back from spring break.

"Most of the students, from what we can tell, are coming back, and they're gonna live in the dorms, and they're gonna do their classes online," Falwell said in a radio interview on March 18. "They don't want to sit at home in the basement and have to do their own laundry," he added, laughing with his host. In the same conversation, Falwell referred to the novel coronavirus as "this flu," said he's "not worried about it," and declared the media response to be "just politics," an effort to "destroy the American economy just to hurt Trump."

Falwell's estimate that "most" students would return isn't quite accurate — the school actually anticipates around 5,000, a third of the residential student body — but that number is still far higher than those housed by comparable schools. In Lynchburg, for example, other universities' remaining on-campus population is in the double or even single digits. Liberty is also keeping its fitness center open, operating dining halls on a take-out or limited seating basis, and requiring faculty without a health exemption to hold in-person office hours and teach online courses from campus instead of in their homes. (In an unfortunate slip of the tongue, Falwell initially resisted moving to online instruction because, he said, the school's extant online classes, which instruct about 85 percent of Liberty's student body under normal conditions, are "really not the same quality of education" as residential courses.)

Falwell has never been coy about his politics and priorities, and here he has mostly stayed true to form. Though in his official capacity Falwell cast his decision as a way to let students "enjoy the room and board they've already paid for and to not interrupt their college life," he has elsewhere made his political rationale inescapably clear: Liberty's dorms are open because Falwell wants to own the libs.

Thus recent posts on his personal Twitter account, which models Trump's feed in its intemperance if not its pace, see Falwell repeatedly using the pandemic as an occasion to praise the president, critique former President Barack Obama, and accuse the media and Democratic politicians of making the "corona flu" an excuse to "destroy the U.S. economy."

Liberty University professors outside of the law school do not have tenure, a fact Falwell has touted as a "sound business decision" to suppress dissent from administration decisions. It is rare for current faculty to disagree with Falwell publicly, as doing so puts their livelihoods at stake. Thus it is not surprising that Marybeth Davis Baggett, the faculty member who spoke out against Falwell's coronavirus policy, first on Facebook and then in a Religion News Service article picked up by The Washington Post, has already secured employment elsewhere for the fall semester.

"Falwell cavalierly assumes no responsibility for at least an enabling and at most an incentivizing the students' decision to return," Baggett wrote. "Rather than provide the steady leadership needed at this sober time, Falwell has chosen to indulge and endanger the students." On her Facebook post, she shared dozens of private messages from Liberty faculty, staff, students, and alumni expressing dismay that the campus is open and that work which could be completed remotely is required to be done on campus. (I've received an unsolicited off-record message from a Liberty employee to similar effect.) Baggett concluded her article with a call for the decision to close Liberty's campus to be taken out of Falwell's hands by Liberty's board of trustees. Falwell responded by calling her "the 'Baggett' lady" on Twitter, linking to a new statement reiterating his plan for the school that often seems to function as his personal fiefdom.

As classes resume at Liberty this week, Falwell shows no sign of backing down, evincing a pointedly lackadaisical attitude about the risks of continuing campus life. He told the Lynchburg News & Advance he wants to "to give [students] the ability to be with their friends." And in the statement Liberty published Monday, Falwell described himself walking around campus, meeting and joking with returning students (a bid to be Liberty's own Typhoid Jerry, perhaps). A petition for the university board to fire Falwell will almost certainly go unheeded unless, as Baggett warns, his plan leads to a "disaster for which he would be primarily to blame."

Like Baggett, my hope and prayer is that the risk Falwell's choice courts will never come, that the campus will not become a grim experiment in what happens when the intemperate right's pandemic imprudence is allowed to set policy for thousands. Firing may be the comeuppance Falwell is due for his politically motivated recklessness, but it would be a comeuppance bought at a tragic price.

Jerry Falwell Jr. says he’s ‘protecting‘ students by calling them back to Liberty University amid pandemic

March 24, 2020 By Shawn Langlois

Jerry Falwell Jr. serves as the president of Liberty University,

founded by his father in 1971. Getty

‘I think we have a responsibility to our students — who paid to be here, who want to be here, who love it here — to give them the ability to be with their friends, to continue their studies, enjoy the room and board they’ve already paid for and to not interrupt their college life.’

That’s Liberty University President and fierce Donald Trump supporter Jerry Falwell Jr. telling the News & Advance that school’s back in session for up to 5,000 students who will be allowed to return from their spring break to the Lynchburg, Va., campus.

This while, according to the Virginia Department of Health, there are at least 290 cases of COVID-19 in Virginia, including 45 people who have been hospitalized and six who have died.

Classes will resume online for the semester in order to comply with a state ban on gatherings of more than 10 people. Campus buildings, like the library and residence halls, will, however, remain open, and instructors are expected to hold office hours. Dining halls will be takeout-only operations.

“I think we, in a way, are protecting the students by having them on campus together,” said Falwell, who has been downplaying the pandemic in recent weeks. “Ninety-nine percent of them are not at the age to be at risk, and they don’t have conditions that put them at risk.”

Earlier this month, Falwell went on Fox News to suggest coronavirus concerns were overblown and the media was using the pandemic as a tool to take down President Trump.

“It’s just strange to me how so many are overreacting,” he said. “The H1N1 virus in 2009 killed 17,000 people, it was the flu also I think, and there was not the same level of hype. You just didn’t see it on the news 24/7 and it makes you wonder if there’s a political reason for that.”

COVID-19, the coronavirus-borne disease that has killed more than 18,000 since being identified in December, is not an influenza subtype. H1N1 was.

Not everybody at the school is on board. Longtime English professor Marybeth Davis Baggett called on Liberty’s trustees to overrule Falwell’s decision to keep campus open.

“Lives are at stake,” Baggett told the News & Advance. “I think this decision is a recipe for disaster, and I have been trying to push that as much as I have been able to internally.”

SEE
https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/03/from-jerry-falwell-jr.html


https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/03/jerry-falwell-jr.html